My (Windows XP, Professional, v2002, SP3) workstation is completely ignoring my hosts file.
Here is the code in my hosts file:
127.0.0.1 localhost
172.17.1.107 wiki
But, when I open a browser and type "wiki" in the URL bar and hit "Enter" it takes me to the old location of my wiki as it appeared in my old hosts file:
10.0.36.100 wiki
Even though I have renamed the old hosts file "hosts_full" and moved it to my desktop (so, out of the etc folder entirely).
I have so far taken the following steps:
- Restarted (3 times)
- Ran
ipconfig /flushdnsfrom the command line - Ran
ping wikifrom the command line, response was
Reply from 10.0.36.100: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=63
I've cleared every cache I can think of (IE, FF).
I have an ISA firewall client that runs on my machine and I've tried all of this with it disabled and enabled. In fact, the firewall uses the old hosts file to resolve itself:
10.0.2.126 isa3
And somehow it still works fine even though the new hosts file doesn't contain that line.
Any ideas??? Thanks in advance for the help!
Any chance you are using a proxy server for browsing? If so it might be that the proxy server is resolving the dns name for you.
And thats why you get different results in a commandline with ping as opposed to the browser.
Off chance traffic is intercepted and changed. Very off chance...
Firewall Responding To Pings?
This is a long shot from the ip address you gave, but what happens when you ping the new ip directly, does that work?
The reason I ask, if 10.0.36.100 happens to be a firewall that responds to the ping, it will say reply from that, even though you were pinging a different IP....
Big Hosts File?
Also, this got me and another IT person once, there were lots of blank lines in the window hosts files, and then entries way down below -- we didn't noticed the scroll bar :-)
Is the hosts file really the hosts file?
Lastly, look in the registry and make sure the host file is where you think it is, the following key specifies where the actual hosts file is:
Try to flush your DNS Cache with Start -> Run...
Also try to deactivate NetBIOS and LMHOSTS for your Network Adapter. You can change the settings in the TCP/IP Properties of the used Network Connection, under Advanced -> WINS.
Turns out that my corporate DNS was being hit before my hosts file. So I:
Now my hosts file works just fine... From the command line. However, if I put an entry in for www.google.com that points to 172.17.1.107, when I ping it from the command line, it returns from the IP address I specified in the hosts file. But if I hit it from the browser, it still shows me Google instead of my local site. But if I put an entry in for "fredspc" that points to 172.17.1.107 and hit that from the browser, it takes me to 172.17.1.107.
I figured this out because if I entered "tedspc" in my hosts file (i.e. something that would never resolve) and gave it an IP address and pinged it, it would resolve to that IP address. The problem was that www.wiki.com and anything else I was entering into my hosts file had an entry in my corporate DNS server, which was causing it to resolve, which meant it never looked at my hosts file (because the corporate DNS server gets looked at first before the hosts file). So I've cut the corporate DNS out of the command prompt loop, but not out of the browser loop I guess... Any ideas?
According to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727005.aspx it could be in your local NETBIOS name cache. You can use nbtstat to query/purge this cache.
shows the cached entries which can be cleared with
Every time I use the host file for my DNS entries (which is always) I turn off(disable) the DNS service (services.msc) running natively. Then do a ipconfig /flushdns if that fails reboot said server/desktop and that will clear the cache. What DNS entries are not in the host file the server/desktop will resort to the Default DNS settings of the Network Interface that have been setup. This also allows for testing different firewalls and such.
I just got caught up changing C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts when %SystemRoot% was defined as C:\WINNT instead of C:\windows... I don't know why this particular server had an entire windows installation in both C:\windows and C:\winnt but at least I don't feel insane anymore.
I feel kind of dumb but it's just another quick check for other people who run into this problem!
Are you sure you are editing RIGHT hosts file? Usually it located in
%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hostsAfter trying many different suggested solutions, I checked the security on the ‘etc’ folder and compared its permissions to that of the ‘es-ES’ folder, and found that the group Users did not have Read & execute rights like they did on the other. After taking ownership (again) of the ‘etc’ folder, I granted group Users Read & execute permissions, and had them inherited by the folder contents. That fixed the problem for me–whatever part of the system queries the hosts file evidently is under the restrictions of the User group. I must have removed the group’s permissions accidentally at some point when trying to modify the hosts file.
Deleting the original file on windows and replacing it with a new one is important!
I know the question has been answered, but it's clear that there are many different reasons and possible solutions. What did the trick for me was to delete the file, rather than to overwrite it.
I also know that @olefebvre already posted something similiar, but I didn't recognize it with its abbreviations and it's not (only) related to odd characters, it is to bring windows to recognize the file at all.