Home | Contact Us | Submit Troubleshooting Info | Search | Help
Output | Software Solutions | Proofing | Color, Screening and Calibration | Scanning | Digital Photography | Consumables | POS
Home | Contact Us | Submit Troubleshooting Info | Search | Help
Output | Software Solutions | Proofing | Color, Screening and Calibration | Scanning | Digital Photography | Consumables | POS
Applies to |
NT 3.51, 4.0 on Alpha and Intel platforms. |
Problem |
Server's IP address changes and host file has not been updated. TCP/IP software that attempts to refer to hostfile by name will implicitly get the old/wrong IP address from the hosts file, and will not work properly (e.g. ClearCase hangs forever). |
Cause |
Whenever Windows NT's TCP/IP wants to resolve a human-readable host name (TCP/IP computer name, e.g. clrwfs1, or ftp.creo.com) to an IP address (e.g. 192.168.29.2, or 204.174.12.25), it will always try to look it up first in "your local hosts file". This is just a plain text file that contains, one per line, mappings of host names to IP addresses. If it finds a matching entry in the hosts file, it will attempt to use it. If it doesn't find a matching entry, it will try to ask the DNS server, if one is configured, which at Creo is almost always enabled and set to Magenta, 204.174.12.40. If the hosts file has a different (incorrect) entry than what the DNS server would return, it will use it anyways, because it always checks the hosts file first if it exists. Performing a local file lookup is almost always faster than sending a request out over the network to the DNS server, so for frequently used servers that almost never change, you can get some performance improvement by listing them in your hosts file. If you don't want to deal with hassles of keeping your hosts file up to date, then don't put anything in it. Then you will be relying on the DNS server always giving you the correct, up-to-date info, which works 99% of the time, but sometimes due to network outages or server crashes/hangs/restarts/etc., might not work and you'll get nothing. |
Solution |
Changing local
hosts file: The local hosts files is located in the NT system directory, at %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, where %SystemRoot% is the value of your SystemRoot environment variable, usually C:\WINNT, or wherever your NT is actually installed. Note that the file name is just "hosts", without any suffix. There may also be a HOSTS.SAM file, which is just a sample to copy from, and is not used by the OS. This is just a plain text file that can be edited with Notepad. Here are some valid sample lines: # this is a comment only line - blank lines are ok Make sure if you edit with Notepad it saves the file as-is, without any suffix. Notepad will add a ".txt" suffix if a suffix is not provided. One way to workaround this is to enclose the filename in double quotes. |
|