On 2 Dec 2006 at 7:52, Lorraine wrote:

>   I'm having problems accessing to my Internet Explorer. I'm using Win
> XP. I get an error message....Cannot find server....page cannot be
> displayed. Are there certain settings that should be checked or
> unchecked? 

  There's a couple of different ways for software to translate a web site 
name to a numeric IP address.  The two main ones are:

1.  A local table of names and addresses in a file called "hosts" (no 
extension).  Out of the box, Windows provides a sample file called 
"hosts.sam" with only two or three entries.  Some malware, and some 
antivirus products, extensively modify this file to try to prevent you 
accessing sites of the other category.  That could be happening, but it 
should only affect access to some specific sites.

2.  A distributed system called DNS, wherby your machine asks a server on 
the Internet to do the translation.  (That remote machine is most often 
provided by your ISP, and can in turn ask other DNS servers around the world 
as needed.)
  To test this function, open a command window (Start|Run|cmd) and type 
"ping www.google.com", you should get an output that looks like:

Pinging www.l.google.com [66.102.7.147] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 66.102.7.147: bytes=32 time=113ms TTL=246
Reply from 66.102.7.147: bytes=32 time=130ms TTL=246
Reply from 66.102.7.147: bytes=32 time=143ms TTL=246
Reply from 66.102.7.147: bytes=32 time=156ms TTL=246

Ping statistics for 66.102.7.147:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 113ms, Maximum = 156ms, Average = 135ms

  The actual numbers you see will probably be different, but the key is in 
that first line where we see that the machine has learned one of Google's 
server addresses (it has several, you may not get the exact same numbers).  
If you see that, but then don't get the "Reply" lines, then you have a 
different kind of problem.
  This can fail in at least three ways:

a.  Your ISP's DNS server might be down.  (I configure my home machine to 
use the DNS server at work, because it seems to be more reliable than the 
one my ISP runs....)  That should be temporary; this does mean that your ISP 
*MAY* be able to help you troubleshoot this.

b.  Some malware works by overriding your normal settings to redirect all of 
your DNS queries to servers they control.  This is usually just to track 
your queries, but it has the potential to allow much nastier infestations 
too.  (If you're not running any antispyware, you might not even know that 
this is going on.)  IF some other agency has gotten the malware operators' 
site taken off the net, then infected machines can no longer resolve 
addresses.  Scan your machine for viruses and spyware and clean off anything 
they find.

c.  In theory, there is one set of code on your machine that speaks DNS.  In 
*practice*, I've seen examples where IE and/or Outlook could not get DNS 
answers, while other software could, or vice versa.  I have to conclude that 
these Microsoft products indlude their own DNS code, and that sometimes it 
can get "out of sync" with the OS facility that other applications use.  (A 
reboot usually fixes this....)

David Gillett

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