In many projects, you might have custom DNS entries, for example for your development environment, or because something is prototype without a real DNS entry yet, or simply for convenience to not remember weird IP addresses.

Currently, these special domains might be used in the configuration of a project (say, the DB server is db1.acme.local), and that's version controlled and everything, but creating the actual DNS entry (in the hosts file for example) is still manual and therefore error prone.

Has anyone figured out a nice solution to this? Or do you all have super quick IT departments that'll give you real domains instantly?^^