Last night I tried to get onto the adobe website to download a trial version of dreamweaver. I got to the download page but the download kept failing (I’m wondering if hat was because of the download program, Getright, I have installed. It kept telling me the file couldn’t be located on their server or something). Anyway after trying a few times, suddenly when I refreshed the page I couldn’t even get there, nor any page on the entire adobe.com domain.
I tried clearing the cache (Firefox), and I also tried IE, and I’ve since rebooted. But I get the same thing: the equivalent of not being connected to the internet (Firefox=“Problem Loading Page, Server not found”; IE = “IE cannot display the webpage”)
It would seem odd for such a major site like adobe to go down, and if something was wrong on their end, it undoubtedly wouldn’t be unaccessible for more than a minute. But here I am, the next morning and the problem’s still happening.
So it’s clearly on my end, but what the heck is going on? Why is my machine treating only that single website as if there’s no internet connection?
Malware? Check your hosts file: something may have written a line to it to redirect access to adobe.com. Low probability, I know, but I’ve had trouble with malware before on IE that did this kind of thing.
The hosts file. It’s a text file located on your computer that contains a list of websuite names and IP addresses. See the link for details of its location on different systems.
Your system checks the hosts file first, before going to the net to find a website. If adobe.com is there, with some totally wrong IP address, your system will try the wrong IP address and do nothing else.
Is there an advantage to using Spybot S&D over, or in addition to AVG’s anti spyware software? Because my gut tells me I really need to keep any future software installations at a minimum.
Well I opened the file (located here: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc on my system, according to your wiki link) and it is really tiny and seems to show nothing relevant. It seems to be saying it’s only a sample, and isn’t actually actively doing anything. Here’s the file text in its entirety:
The tools that come with it, including the Immunizer and hosts file, which are your immediate needs. The actual scanning and removal is not so hot these days and has been overtaken by SuperAntiSpyware and Avast, IMO.
The tools are still very useful though. Including the Tea-Timer, the redirect locking feature and the startup programs control.
The secure shredder available as a (free) extra now, is also good.
Some of these functions are also available in CCleaner too.
If you want that get it from FileHippo other sites make you jump through hoops and are somewhat suspect in their nature.
No problems there. That’s the default file. All it’s doing is redirecting anything with the domain localhost back to your machine. If you had a webserver running, you’d see what page it served.