WinXP won't clear the DNS cache (can it be cleared manually)?

DevilsPGD wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

It's kind of hard to see *anything* in the posters HTML.

Here's what I actually see on my screen......I didn't even attempt to read it...............

The strange thing is that almost everyone on the net recommends we turn OFF the DNS Client (aka DNS Caching) services, [...]

It's usually folk wisdom, that almost certainly has been passed on from each to the other.  It's often not based upon knowledge of what the DNS Client does or is.  (One person in your list there thinks that the DNS Client is a DNS server, for example.)  It's instead based upon an Animal-Farm-like simplistic notion of  "service enabled bad, service disabled good", which is of course wrong.   A second person in your list even blames the DNS Client service for the facts that xyr several ISPs are not presenting the same views of the DNS namespace as each other, and that sometimes DNS lookups produce (gasp!) answers that say that a particular domain name doesn't exist. Interestingly, one of the items in your list is someone posting this piece of folk wisdom in a discussion forum and having it debunked by other people.  As you note, what you'll find written by Microsoft doesn't support this folk wisdom, either.  As M. Fekay says, Microsoft is right about its own software, here.  There are some instances where Microsoft gets things wrong about its own products, usually resulting from the fact that it's a big company and in such companies the people who write the user documentation are sometimes not the people who develop the software, or from the fact that even people within Microsoft aren't immune from believing Internet/WWW-garnered erroneous received wisdom from time to time, but this particular instance isn't one of them.

The most noteworthy item in your list is the documentation for Simple DNS Plus.  That's the only one that you present that actually gives a sensible reason for not having the DNS Client service enabled: namely that Simple DNS Plus is a fully-fledged caching resolving proxy DNS server, and if one has one of those locally, having the extra caching in the DNS Client service on the same machine makes no sense. Further sensible advice is the advice that you're ignoring, but that you'll find equally widely disseminated: Don't use DNS for this task at all.  It's the wrong tool.  The DNS is not a tool for meeting WWW browsing customization needs. That's a lesson that the world learned in 2003.  Use an advertisment-blocking HTTP proxy server; use a PAC script, or use one of the many WWW browser plug-ins that do what you want to do. There two lessons here:

Folk wisdom is often based upon people using magic incantations and not really understanding what their computers do. Abusing the DNS to solve an HTTP problem is wrongheaded.

Attachment decoded: untitled-1.htm

Reply to
DanS
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Not to call you out on missing something obvious, but the previous poster did quote, but it was done using indents rather than quote marks.

Actually, it wasn't done with indents.  It was done with <blockquote>, which is, as the name states, a quote.  The usage here was directly in line with what the element is actually for.  Using it to indent is in fact a mis-use, deprecated in the HTML 4.01 specification.

Reply to
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard

S/He did? I didn't see any quoting character so I skipped the rest.

Reply to
Joel

posted to alt.internet.wireless only, where I read it; disrespecting and disregarding the original crossposted group and also the f/up to a another group I don't read

Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote: Content-Type: text/html;

You shouldn't be posting anything other than plaintext into general usenet discussion groups; (and) your plaintext should be using the accepted > quote marks with that plaintext (and) you should only post html into groups where it is acceptable, which isn't very many.

And -- you should get a shorter handle (while you are at it, reforming).

Reply to
Mike Easter

In the style M. deBoynePollard uses, there are no quoting characters.=20

And I don't know why your newsreader shows his or assuming anyone else = that posts HTML in the fashion it did. CHeck Forte Agent's settings.

Anyway, let's get back on topic...

--=20 Ace

This posting is provided "AS-IS" with no warranties or guarantees and = confers no rights.

Please reply back to the newsgroup or forum for collaboration benefit = among responding engineers, and to help others benefit from your = resolution.

Ace Fekay, MVP, MCT, MCITP EA, MCTS Windows 2008 & Exchange 2007, MCSE & = MCSA 2003/2000, MCSA Messaging 2003 Microsoft Certified Trainer Microsoft MVP - Directory Services

If you feel this is an urgent issue and require immediate assistance, = please contact Microsoft PSS directly. Please check =

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Reply to
Ace Fekay [MVP-DS, MCT]

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