VirtualName-based local development host behind corporate proxy (MAMP)

Question

I am behind a corporate proxy server/firewall, and this firewall seems to not be too happy with my idea of local development. On my home computer (Mac/Leopard), I have MAMP running, with a rule in /etc/hosts that directs dev.example.com to 127.0.0.1, and I have a virtualhost set up in the httpd.conf file which works great for me.

However, at work, I set up the exact same configuration, but am not able to access dev.example.com, likely due to some address/DNS translation going on via the proxy server.

Here are the relevant details from Terminal:

$ ping dev.example.com
PING dev.example.com (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.025 ms

$ host dev.example.com
Host dev.example.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

I've tried adding dev.example.com to the list of bypass addresses in System Preferences (the 'Bypass proxy settings for these Hosts & Domains' list), but that had no effect.

Is there any way I can develop locally using name-based hosts at work? I can access localhost, but can't get to the dev.example.com (or any other custom virtualhosts) here at work, which complicates other matters related to the sites on which I'm working...

Answer 1

Well, guess who's the village idiot? Me!

I decided to go back to the basics and see where I went wrong... turns out I had MAMP running on the MAMP default ports (8888 and 8889). Therefore, nothing worked when I went to dev.example.com on the default port (80).

Stupid waste of time. Oh well.