webdns is your friend !
Sorry for the stale news if anyone but me knew about this already, but I just discovered how easy it is to have create a temporary hostname, and this is really cool:
Suppose that you’re about to carry out an web-based experiment (called tutor, for instance), and that you don’t want to setup a whole new machine for that, because you already have a machine with apache mysql etc… installed (ex: sacha1.csail.mit.edu)
On the other hand, it would be nice to tell your users to visit a webpage that has a name relevant to your experiment (say tutor.csail.mit.edu, instead of http://sacha1.csail.mit.edu/experiments/tutor for instance !!!).
With webdns, nothing’s easier: just visit https://webdns.csail.mit.edu:1443/cgi-bin/webdns.cgi, choose a to add new hostname (i.e: tutor.csail.mit.edu) and give it the same IP address as the one of your existing server. Et Voila: Less than an hour later, you have the tutor.csail.mit.edu hostname pointing to your machine !
The story goes even further: You can Tell apache (ot twisted etc…) to display a different site depending on which url was used to reach your computer…
After your experiment is over, you can use webdns again to get rid of the DNS record you used, so that this way the csail.mit.edu domain name doesn’t get polluted with useless stuff.
See also http://www.dyndns.org, which does the same thing, I think.