All of a sudden (as of yesterday), for just about every website I visit, I’m getting the message “The server at soclnet.com is taking too long to respond.”
Uh, I’m not trying to visit any soclnet.com. Why is my browser looking there?
I am assuming you are using Windows XP. My guess is that your hosts file got hijacked by a viri. The hosts file is a file that stores DNS info instead of actually looking at the dns server. This is how it works. Usually when you type in www.straightdope.com in a browser, your computer talks to a Domain Name Server (DNS). The DNS server takes www.straightdope.com and converts www.straightdope.com to the IP address 209.104.5.198. Why? Because computers understand IPs while humans understand words. Without DNS you would have to type in the IP for each website.
Anyway, you can bypass DNS by entering in information on domains and IP addresses in your hosts file. The hosts file is located in the directory
c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
That will send any request to go to www.whatever.com to 127.0.0.1, which is the local host. In other words, it won’t go anywhere.
You can check your host file by browsing to
c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
richt clicking on the host file and choose open. It should ask you what you want to open the file with, choose notepad.
For the vast majority of users it will be blank except for some comments about how the hosts file works.
If there are entries in there for the websites you cannot reach you probably have the virus.
The last time I ran into an issue like this the viri locked down the host file by making it read only. It was a pain to get out. To remove the virus I had to boot to linux, kill the virus and change the file permissions.
Slee
Note, other os’s use hosts, I just don’t know the location for Vista or 7. It may be the same path but I haven’t checked.
Yes, Windows XP, SP3, should have latest Windows/Adobe updates, running Firefox. I can get to every site I want to go to, but get the message on each page after a few seconds.
Under the c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, I have
Isn’t that correct, based on what you said? (Sorry, clueless n00b where DNS entries are concerned.)
So this isn’t something the virus catcher would catch? Hrm.
Curiously, this only seems to happen with Firefox, not IE. Under IE/Tools/Internet Options/Connections/Lan settings “Automatically detect settings” is checked.
Under Firefox, is Tools/Options/Advanced/Network/Settings (by Connections) the same thing? “Use system proxy settings” is turned on there.
My Norton full scan finished with nothing unusual found. I’ve gone in and turned on the option to display all the hidden files and then rebooted. I’ll look at the hosts file location again and see if anything looks different there.
Hrm, running Firefox in Safe Mode (I used the option under Program files) seems to make the problem go away even if I don’t check any boxes. Interesting.
Yup, using Echofon on desktop and netbook. Desktop is the device having the problem (so far).
When I was googling for info, I did see a tweet somewhere that contained the “soclnet.com” link, and I wondered if something I had clicked on for Twitter had caused the problem.
That should be easy enough to check, I guess. I’ll disable Echofon on the desktop and see if that changes the symptom.
I disabled Echofon and the messages went away. Thanks for the tip!
I’m a little sad though, because I really liked that add-on (I like seeing the Twitter msgs pop up in the browser). Apparently I need to be more careful of the links I click on in Twitter.