“Once I was developing a website for one of my clients. I finished my works and was waiting for his feedback and of course the final payment but everything went wrong. The next day my client rang me and he said he is not seeing his website any mean near in his browser- it showing server not found. But i was successfully able to watch every time I look at the site. So, what can I do? Without seeing the site he can’t approve the work and I can’t have my payment. So, I asked him a very bloody foolish thing to do which actually works sometimes . I said please restart the computer and try again. In That case it was ok. he was able to see the work and I got some good cash :D. But, I encounter this problem by myself in the next day with some other site and specially site like Facebook it said server not found and  I suddenly started to encounter ‘time-out’ error messages with certain sites – Our TechnoCrews was one of them! On looking further, I could not find any logic to the dozen or so sites I regularly visit being unavailable. I tried accessing these sites through an online proxy – the sites loaded. I re-booted and ran all the adware / spyware / virus programs – all to no avail. I managed to Google the problem and found some obscure forum with the response ‘go to command line prompt and type “ipconfig /flushdns” ‘ which I duly did. WOW, What a miracle – my  problem solved – but why did we need to do this, what is a DNS flush and how can I avoid this problem in the future?”

If you have a scenario like above and you are seeking answer for it, then I am inviting you to read my article straightway.

Well, I want to first describe why my clients case work with a re-booting of his computer. A reboot is also another way of flushing the DNS. In fact, it’s one of the many reasons that so many tech support folks insist you reboot as the first step when investigating just about anything. Trust me, at that time when I offered the suggestion to him ( My Client) I had no idea of that about the DNS flushing( Yes! I am always honest to share what I don’t know :D).

Okay, now we are going to discuss about DNS Flushing. First of all, What is DNS? DNS is an acronym for the Domain Name System.  I will write another article about this later as this is all about DNS Flushing. Right now just worth to know that, they are the means we all navigate the internet by; they hold the IP information for each site (e.g convert bbc.co.uk to 212.58.224.131). For website developers they are the most important because as information is updated we need DNS servers to point to the fresh content rather than the old.

In The operating System DNS is maintained and stored by the “DNS Cache”. Sometimes, for various reasons, the cache becomes corrupt or out of date, or to use a technical term: “messed up”. The symptoms vary, but the most common is that you can’t get to some web sites in your browser. At that time we need the DNS Flushing. Now I am just showing you how to do it in your computer OS. Below listed solutions are the way of DNS Flushing in different operating system.

XP And Below:
1.) Go to start->run.
2.) Type in “cmd” without the quotes.
3.) At the command prompt type “ipconfig /flushdns” again without quotes.

Vista/Windows 7:
1.) Click on start->All Programs->Accessories
2.) Right click on the command prompt and pick run as administrator.
3.) At the command prompt type “ipconfig /flushdns” no quotes.

Linux:
1.) Open a root terminal or use sudo (in ubuntu or similar systems) with the following command:
– “/etc/rc.d/init.d/nscd restart” (without quotes)

Mac OSX Leopard:
1.) Use the following command in a terminal window:
– “dscacheutil -flushcache” (without quotes)

Mac OSX 10.5.1 and before:
1.) Use the following command in a shell/terminal window:
– “lookupd -flushcache” (without quotes)

This will flush your DNS and will solve a lot of issues with your computer caching the wrong information.

By Mizanur Rahaman Mizan

I dream for a great Future for all. I do business with my ITES brand named TechnoCrews . I regularly blog on www.teronga.com and MizPress plusalso write content for others. Of course as a freelance writer. I love WordPress and I love to give new ideas a life for my clients.

66 thoughts on “DNS problem ? Flush it!!”
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