HOSTS file being ignored

65,229

Solution 1

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...

Solution 2

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:

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\DataBasePath

Solution 3

Try to flush your DNS Cache with Start -> Run...

 ipconfig /flushdns

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.

Solution 4

Turns out that my corporate DNS was being hit before my hosts file. So I:

Opened my TCP/IP Properties (Control Panel > Network Connections > Local Area Connection > Properties > (scroll down) Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) > Properties.
Clicked "Use the following DNS server addresses:" (Instead of Obtain DNS server address automatically)
entered "172.0.0.1" and "172.0.0.2" (and clicked ok)

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?

Solution 5

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.

nbtstat /c

shows the cached entries which can be cleared with

nbtstat /R

View more solutions

65,229

Author by

cmcculloh

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

cmcculloh almost 2 years
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:
1. Restarted (3 times)
2. Ran ipconfig /flushdns from the command line
3. Ran ping wiki from 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!
- shufler almost 15 years
  
  what happens when you create a new entry for that ip, say 172.17.1.107 wikitest?
cmcculloh almost 15 years

What should the permissions be (right now the file is not read only and all permissions are set to allow for all users)? I tried setting to www.wiki.com and it still didn't work. (I changed the line to 172.17.1.107 www.wiki.com) Then I opened up my command prompt and tried pinging www.wiki.com and it returned "Pinging www.wiki.com [70.35.23.23] with 32 bytes of data" but then it said "Request timed out" three times. Then anything I tried to ping returned Request timed out. I'm in the middle of a BIND install now to try and fix this, I don't know if that would effect the pings...
cmcculloh almost 15 years

And now I either installed BIND wrong, or my computer is ignoring that too, because it isn't working either...
cmcculloh almost 15 years

Yeah, everything in lmhosts.sam is commented out and there's only the two lines I specified in the original question in my hosts file...
olefebvre almost 15 years

Try deleting the file and create a new one, w/o copy/pasting. Maybe some texteditor inserted odd characters in there (UTF8).
cmcculloh almost 15 years

1: Reply from 172.17.1.107: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=63 2: Nope, reviewed entire hosts file scroll-bar and all... 3: DataBasePath, Type="REG_EXPAND_SZ", Data="%SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc" That %SystemRoot% part got me curious, so I opened up my "Environment Variables" and looked for a SystemRoot variable. Didn't see one, so I created one and set it to C:\Windows, then I did an ipconfig /flushdns and pinged www.wiki.com, but it still responded from 70.35.23.23 instead of 172.17.1.107 (which is what I set it to in my hosts file). Thanks though! Good suggestions all!
Oskar Duveborn over 14 years

Perhaps your web browsers are configured with a proxy server?
cmcculloh over 14 years

Yes, actually, I found out there is a corporate proxy that is intercepting my requests and responding to them. Somehow it was bypassing my hosts file. If there was an entry in the corporate proxy it was overriding my local hosts file entry. While this answer didn't really tell "how" to fix the problem, it did identify the actual root cause of the problem (it's not the firewall...)
user51928 about 11 years

This fixed it for me. I just added the Users group directly to the hosts file, flushed the cache, and the hosts file was immediately respected again.
manas over 9 years

.. *bitch* roll out .. Lol
artifex over 9 years

It only took 4 years before someone noticed @silent_warrior ;)
haakym about 8 years

@artifex Thanks for your answer and comment, this led me to realise that I can set up exceptions which solved my issue. Anyone interested see here: stackoverflow.com/questions/37658876/…
Manny about 6 years

Good catch, my system was booting off of drive E: and not C: as expected.
mwfearnley over 4 years

My experience has generally been that Windows is fine with tabs in the hosts file. Has this solution worked for anyone?
mwfearnley over 4 years

I'm guessing the DNS servers should be local IPs (127.0.0.x, not 172.0.0.x)?