does my IE ignore the hosts file?

31 Jul 2006 9:25 AM

entrepreneur

i know that after you enter a domain name into the address bar of your
ie, you computer first will check your hosts to see if there is any DNS
entry to match that domain name. if yes, the computer will use the
corresponding ip to see a request to the server. so i think if i put a
wrong entry into the hosts, see, the ip of A corresponds the DNS of B.
i just wonder after that if i enter the DNS of B, my IE will bring me
to site A, NOT B. but i can't success. what's wrong? can anyone help
me? thank in advance.

31 Jul 2006 10:26 AM

Ian

Two possible reasons:

1. Sites previously visited have their IP address stored in the History
list. In this case, IE dosn't bother to do a name-lookup, it assumes the IP
hasn't changed. This can give weird problems if the IP HAS changed, for
example if the webhost has done maintenance recently. To cure this you need
to clear the history AND the address-bar MRU-list.

2. If IE is set to use a proxy server, then the proxy server does all the
looking-up, and hence it's the HOSTS file on the proxy that counts.

1 Aug 2006 8:34 AM

entrepreneur

Ian wrote:

> Two possible reasons:
>
> 1. Sites previously visited have their IP address stored in the History
> list. In this case, IE dosn't bother to do a name-lookup, it assumes the IP
> hasn't changed. This can give weird problems if the IP HAS changed, for
> example if the webhost has done maintenance recently. To cure this you need
> to clear the history AND the address-bar MRU-list.
>
> 2. If IE is set to use a proxy server, then the proxy server does all the
> looking-up, and hence it's the HOSTS file on the proxy that counts.

do i need to flushdns?