Forum Moderators: phranque
Whenever I try to access particular websites (not all, just some), I get either the Apache test page or a "Page Cannot Be Displayed" error. If I stop running the Apache service, I get connection failure errors when trying to access those particular sites.
It's like my computer is forcing those particular domain names to resolve as my localhost... or to my localhost ip 127.0.0.1. I can even put a forwardslash on the domain name and go to one of my LOCAL htdoc sites and it displays just as if I went to [localhost...] like if I went to [adwords.google.com...] mysite comes up, being served, of course, out of my local machine. But again, this is only on certain domain names, and I just don't understand it at all.
This is SO weird to me, and I have no idea why only particular sites (or in some cases, only particular subdomains) are giving me this problem.
Does anybody know of this issue? It happens cross browser: tested on Firefox, IE, Netscape. I'm running an Apache 2 server on XP for development purposes. I don't know if this problem started exactly when I installed Apache, although I've only recently noticed it, so probably not (although I don't know for sure).
Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Welcome to WebmasterWorld!
We had a thread awhile back on problems with localhost on Windows XP SP2 [webmasterworld.com] that may pertain to your problem. A link to a Microsoft 'fix' is included in that thread.
Jim
Worked like a charm. Actually, I thought it didn't work for a minute because even after rebooting, my primary browser, Firefox, still displayed my localhost; however, I tried on IE and saw things working fine.
Then, I went back to Firefox, cleared the cache, and it worked fine.
When reading the steps, I remembered that back when I was trying to remove adware and stuff, I downloaded a replacement to my HOST file that had sites known for adware placed on it. But, I totally forgot I did that. So, now whenever there's a site I WANT to access that's on that list, I'll just remove it.
Thanks SO much. You see, google adwords was on that list, so it was cramping my ability to advertise!
Thanks again.
By the way, did I say, "Thanks?"
I can certainly see where that would be a problem! I hope your positions and CTR's were all high when you "re-discovered" them after such a long time away... ;)
Glad that thread helped.
Jim
