Hosts...again :-)

[RJK]

I just Norton ghosted XP pro on an 8gb hd, onto an 80gb hd, for a friend,
and all went swimmingly

We had some to spare...which is rare...so I popped
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm 's host file into his
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc folder, (even though the hosts file seems to
have been abandoned ? , and rebooted and it's being ignored by his XP pro
/ IE6 !

WHAT IS IT WITH WINDOWS ...regarding the hosts file? How much more have I
got to learn about proxy servers and goodness know what else ? I thought
the theory was, that the HOSTS file is just dropped into the etc directory
and it's detected by Windows at start-up ? And the hosts filename, (with no
filetype), has to be in uppercase ? It's Hosts in the zip from the
above site.

As a test, into his IE6 url address slot I typed www.tangozebra.com which
should have been directed to 127.0.0.1 because this url is listed in hosts -
the web site loaded, so Hosts was not being read by his XP / IE6 !

Now during extensive tweaking on my own pc because hosts was being ignored
by my XP Home ed. / IE6 , ..hosts suddenly started working and I don't know
why ...which was REALLY annoying because I was trying to be methodical.
....I was in the middle of putting in no-ads.pac dun auto configuration
script from http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/#howtouse , while
continually zooming off / rebooting and so on - to see if Hosts was
working - and at one point I thought that
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=271361 had somehow triggered something,
somewhere to make XP use the hosts file. Then it seemed to me that IE6's
security | Intranet setting "Include all sites that bypass the proxy
setting" was what did the trick but, now it doesn't seem that way.

Now this may sound daft but, I had a shortcut to the etc directory on my
desktop, and I opened the etc folder, (where I keep hosts.zip), and opened
hosts.zip and dragged Hosts from that zip file into the etc folder. The
filename briefly appeared as Hosts , and without any intervention from me
suddenly changed to HOSTS ...all uppercase. So what's going on here ?

any thoughts appreciated

regards, Richard

 

[Jim Byrd]

Hi Richard - Well, I found your post a little confusing, and rather than try
and dissect just what you did, let's deal with what you need to do. Mike
Burgess' very excellent HOSTS file is available from
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm in several different forms. You
can click to the text version here:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt, then right click, Select All|Copy
and then paste this to new Notepad file which you then save in your
%SystemDrive%\%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc folder as HOSTS (all caps,
no extension), or

You can download the .zip'd version from here:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.zip and unzip the contained file
(HOSTS - no extension, all caps) to that same
%SystemDrive%\%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc folder.

Finally, I would strongly recommend that you read carefull all of the
material at Mike's hosts.htm page.

If you're still having difficulties, then please post back with details
concerning exactly what happens, what problems occur, what error messages
you see, etc.


--
Please respond in the same thread.
Regards, Jim Byrd, MS-MVP



In

 

[Jim Byrd]

Hi Richard - Just to follow up - the locations I gave were for XP or Win2k.
If you're on 98/ME, then the appropriate location for the HOSTS file will be
just %SystemDrive%\%SystemRoot%\

--
Please respond in the same thread.
Regards, Jim Byrd, MS-MVP



In

 

[RJK]

Thanx Jim

I'll have a careful look at http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
I must be doing / have done something simple and daft somewhere

regards, Richard

 

[Jim Byrd]

YW, Richard - Let us know how you make out with this.

--
Please respond in the same thread.
Regards, Jim Byrd, MS-MVP



In