Perhaps we should take this off list.  I don't mind the lengthy reply at 
all. That is how I learn this stuff.  On the nslookup, I get a dns timed 
out on this machine.  I don't appear to have I  traceroute.  I could 
easily use my wife's machine to get to blindbargains, but it just drives 
me nuts I can't do it on this machine and I need to know why.  Your help 
is greatly appreciated.  One of the things I think is really really 
strange is I can't even get there when I go tto that page from a google 
search.
73
Butch Bussen
wa0vjr
open Node 3148
Las Vegas


On Wed, 15 Jul 2009, Martin McCormick wrote:

> Butch Bussen writes:
>> I don't know what a nslookup is nor do I know what a traceroute is.  I
>> don't have a firewall on this machine, do have spybot and windows
>> defender and avast, but I think I've disabled these, but not sure I'm
>> really getting them turned off.  I can ping the address 72.46.157.51 and
>> get a response on this machine, but don't get an answer from
>> blindbargains.com
>
> 	That tells quite a bit right there. nslookup which is
> short for name server lookup exists on many Windows systems but
> it came from the Unix world. What it does is send a query out to
> one of your default domain name servers. Those are the systems
> that your computer talks to to change a name such as
> blindbargains.com or google.com in to 1 or more numerical IP
> addresses. There may be many IP addresses that all go to the
> same name so if the name server responds with several, your
> computer will usually use the first one it gets and ignore all
> the rest.
>
> 	Anyway, you run nslookup from a command prompt and it
> goes like this:
>
> nslookup google.com
> nslookup columbia.edu
> nslookup blindbargains.com
>
> 	The nslookup program will tell you which name server it
> used and then the ip address or addresses of the system you just
> queried for.
>
> 	nslookup also works a little differently than the rest
> of your system in that it always goes out and asks a name server
> even if you just asked for the same lookup 10 seconds ago.
>
> 	The rest of your system also does lookups, but it caches
> the answers that come back and uses a value that is sent back to
> you that says how many seconds to remember this lookup such as
> 43200 for twelve hours or 3600 for 1 hour.
>
> 	When that time runs out, your computer will go out and
> ask again the next time you look for that same name but it won't
> bother the DNS until that timer runs out.
>
> 	Traceroute is another neat program that can help you
> diagnose a problem. It sends out special ping packets that are
> supposed to cause all the routers or gateways along the way to
> sound off and report their location so you can see where your
> packets go to communicate with this or that host. For many
> reasons, it doesn't always work the way one would wish but it is
> worth a try if you have it.
>
> 	In your case, it would be good to have traceroute on one
> computer that is working for this page and the one that does not
> to see where the difference is. It will probably never get going
> on the one that is not resolving that web site and on the other,
> it may produce lots of output which will be the names of the
> routers or maybe just their IP numbers if they don't have names.
>
> 	Sorry for the length, here, but you asked and it is kind
> of hard to answer questions of this type in ten words or less.
>
> Martin McCormick
>
>