2015-01-17-0245Z


had an interesting problem with a local client today. her Windows 8.1 computer was able to get email, once I got the wifi credentials entered correctly, but attempts to connect to websites were failing. calling up a CMD prompt and pinging various domains was giving me, without fail, addresses in the 198.18.1/24 range, but I could ping to 8.8.8.8 no problem. switching the DNS in IPV4/Properties was no help. googling gave very few results, but I finally found the ipconfig /flushdns command from the administrative command prompt which worked.

what kind of a bogus default is that? an unusable address (at least, currently, assigned as SPECIAL-IPV4-BENCHMARK-TESTING-IANA-RESERVED) polluting the resolver cache when DNS is unreachable?

sure, I could have punted and rebooted, and it probably would have "fixed" it too. but then I wouldn't have found this ugly bug in the operating system.

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last updated 2015-01-16 21:52:29. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com