I've been playing around with the following scenario and I'm wondering if this should work in theory:
Configure the following in the hosts file on windows:
<IP of server that's down> hostA
<IP of server that's down> hostA
<valid IP> hostA
and then access
http://hostA:8080 in Chrome, FF and IE. My hope is that all three browsers will eventually find the hostA mapping to the valid IP.
Right now I'm testing with IE and I'm seeing some odd results where it sometimes seems to work and sometimes it doesn't. I wanted to check to set if this configuration and the result I'm expecting are valid.