Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Can’t connect to facebook, YouTube etc? Try flushing your DNS first…
I was having a problem connecting to facebook and YouTube from my laptop, but only when I was connected to the internet via our company network in the office – I had no problem at all accessing these sites when using the same machine at home. I knew that there must be some way around this problem because the company DOES NOT have a block on those sites, it’s just that for some reason or other most of the computers on the company network can’t access those same sites, except for one desktop machine.
After much googling and tracing and comparing the settings on this desktop with my own laptop I figured that it might be something simple and, in my case, it was as simple as flushing the DNS to make sure that the laptop wasn’t “remembering” to try and find facebook in the wrong place. That over simplifies it a bit, but the short of my problem was that every time I typed facebook into my address bar while connected to the company network the route which that request was taking was leading to a server over in the Far East somewhere, and it seems that facebook is blocked on that particular server.
Here’s how I fixed it – this may work for you, it may not, but it takes a couple of seconds and is very easy for anyone to do. These instructions are for Windows XP – they may work for Windows Vista/7 but I have no experience with them. For more information and instructions on how to do this on other operating systems please click here to see the Tech-FAQ page where I ended up after all my searching for solutions. I did already know about flushing the DNS – I just kind of had a “duh!” moment when I landed on that page.
1) Click on your Windows “Start” button.
2) Type “cmd” in the box (WITHOUT the inverted commas) and click the “Ok” button.
3) Wait a couple of seconds and you will see the window pop up with a flashing cursor. This is the command prompt.
4) Type “ipconfig /flushdns” (again, WITHOUT the inverted commas – don’t forget the little space before the forward slash) then press the “Enter/Return” key on your keyboard.
5) That’s it. You should see a message which says “Windows IP Configuration - Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache” confirming that all is well.
Close the command prompt window and, with a bit of luck, you’ll be able to access those previously inaccessible sites again.
