Update on the Hell Computer:

[chaobell]

Finally broke down and called AT&T support.

Spoke to a decently competent tech. Went along with everything he suggested, laughing softly every time it failed. He and I hemmed and hawed, and grumbled, and finally he brought a senior tech into the fray.

The fix: Search all files and folders for "hosts." Find a file called "hosts" with no extension. Deleted. Rebooted. Tested. It worked.

All this shit...over one file. Bah.

Comments

Re: hmm

[chaobell]

Basically, the damn box would pull up every website in the whole world except att.net, which of course was the one the customer needed. Had tried multiple browsers (tried Netscape and even Lynx out of exasperation this morning), multiple connections, both LAN and dial-up, including my personal IO dialup, tracert, ping, and pretty much anything else you could name. It was as if att.net didn't exist.

He did have some less-than-reputable "popup blockers" and crap (*coughBonzicough*), which I trashed posthaste when it first came in. Apparently, they decided to haunt me from beyond the grave. :)

Re: hmm

[chaobell]

Yeah, I hit it with Ad-Aware the second it hit the bench, and it found and killed a bunch of junk. Then just to get a second opinion because I wasn't convinced all the crap was gone, I hit it with Spybot, which found a handful of stuff Ad-Aware missed. I think he had:

--Bonzi crap
--At least two LiveShows variants
--SaveNow
--Gator (killkillkillkillkill)
--Remnants of Xupiter
--that damned HuntBar thing that has been plaguing us lately, regsvr32 /u'd away and deleted manually because I don't trust AA/SB to completely trash the damn things
--Bunch of other crap I can't remember off the top of my head

Re: hmm

[infusco.livejournal.com]

hmmm, gotta try that one day as we get tons of customers who call us because they cannot view one or two sites I can.

We always assumed it was some sort of wierd routing problem.

Have you ever heard of cases where deleting the hosts file made things worse?

and does that file exist in all versions of windows from 95 on?

Did I call it?

[speedball.livejournal.com]

By the way, I used to work AT&T Worldnet tech support...

Kurt

Re: Did I call it?

[chaobell]

Close, but no cigar! hosts.sam and lhosts.sam didn't do the trick. It was a file called "hosts" with no extension. Stinkin' thing. :)

Re: Did I call it?

[kalidor.livejournal.com]

hosts.sam is a default file, you copy that to hosts for your original settings

lhosts.sam is the original for the lhosts file, which is exclusivly for netbios.

Kinda sucks, but I make frequent use of the hosts file myself. Its great for blocking ads/popups/popunders, and I have seen some annoying popunders hosted on att.net .. so something may have tossed it there.

Its just sad that it caused that kinda of conflict, but I guess its usefullness vs annoyingness of a particular server, eh?

i'm low lvl tech for Comcrap

[doingtimein419.livejournal.com]

i've played with my host file before, fun stuff, you can make all sort of stuff stop happening. but if you mess with it, setting stoopidpopupurl.com to 127.0.0.1. now i'm wondering if i did that would the nslookup point to that?