Reply #32: Well now ...

[RoyGBiv]

I feel stupid. I searched for kitchensink.not, rather than with the zero. I have no idea why that didn't occur to me.

But, it seems, what had occurred to me as a possibility before I unfortunately got off on the AOL track is that this is some sort of DNS corruption/attack or a HOSTS file problem.

Or not. This seems to be an ongoing issue with even people from Google not entirely certain what's happening.

After reading through several of these threads, including one on Google's support group on Usenet from *today*, yes, this appears to be a pervasive issue that is spreading.

Seems like we were barking up the wrong tree with AOL being the culprit as several people posting don't use AOL. (That Google via AOL thing is, I think, a result of your using the search bar in Firefox. That thing can be modified so that it redirects things.)

At least I don't feel so bad for being clueless.

There's a couple things you can try. I have no idea if this will work. We'll do this first, and tomorrow I'm going to try to show you how to use OpenDNS as your DNS server to bypass AOL's.

Go to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC on your hard drive and look for a file called "hosts" and open it in notepad. If it's not there, just create it with notepad.

If it exists and anything at all is in there, save the file as hosts.bak or something, and then create a new file called hosts ... just hosts, not hosts.txt or any extension at all. Grrr ... I just remembered I can't remember now if notepad automatically adds the .txt extension or allows you to edit it out. You may have to save it as is, then rename it so it doesn't have an extension. Well ... if it comes to that I'll explain that later if you don't know how. It'd just clog this up.

Anyway ... so, where we're at now is we have a clean, new file open in notepad. Add this line:

209.85.171.99 google.com

Save it, again as just hosts in the directory mentions. Restart your browser. (You may have to reboot ... I can't remember if that's required in Windows or not. Do it anyway just in case.) What this does is when you go anywhere on the network, your browser first looks to see if you have a hosts file, and if you do, it gets the IP address out of the hosts file rather than doing a DNS query.

If you get all that done, let me know how it goes.