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Thanks Danalog for fixing the login page!! Now I have an extra 30 seconds a day to ***** about my 6.3.

I'm relatively conversant with IO redirection symbols... ;)



That's an assumption you can't make. Of course it resolves to your local address. But can you guarantee that in all cases, that local system isn't running a webserver? Can you guarantee that local system isn't running some sort of tcp wrappers on port 80? Can you guarantee that the local system does not have some sort of IP redirection scheme running that might result in a timeout?


You are correct in that most of the time you could run that command and not break anything. But you aren't just fixing an issue with seeing some sigs you don't like. You aren't even just preventing your web browswer from loading pages with that address. You are permanently (ok, until you re-edit it) changing your systems network configuration such that it will always resolve any internet address named "wow.allakhazam.com" to your own local host. You should *never* make that sort of change lightly. It's not just a web server. It's an internet address, and it affects any and all network protocols.

You are free to make a choice to add a line to your hosts file if you wish. But as an IT admin I immediately cringe when people hand out advice on how to "fix" problems with a piece of software by making broad changes to system configuration files. You might know and understand what you're doing. Odds are the person taking your advice doesn't, and will likely have no clue when 6 months later something else doesn't work because of the change they made. It's the kind of "doh" problem you really want to avoid when configuring computers.

The correct solution is to fix the problem at the browser level. If the browser allows you to block addresses and/or names, then that's how you fix the problem. If it doesn't, then you deal with it. You do *not* make a system wide change to fix a problem with a web browswer. That's going to bite you in the rear in the long run.

Hehe. Don't mean to come off like an **** beotch, but this happens to be a real pet peeve of mine. You would simply not believe the number of hours I've had to spend tracking down weird problems on computers only to find out the cause was something exactly like this. Someone with admin rights to the system makes a system change to fix a software application problem and forgot about it because it fixed the problem at hand, but broke something else down the line. It's also one of the most difficult things to debug because systems "shouldn't" be messed with like that. It's somewhat normal to assume that if I'm initiating a network connection to a particular network name, that I'm going to get the correct network address for that name. It's also somewhat of a blind spot for admins in this case, since we tend to assume that since we know better then to do this that this means no one would actually edit a host file to avoid seeing a linked sig on a web site so it's one of the last places we look. That and when we ask a question like "Did you edit any of the system files", the person in question *always* say's "Oh no! I would never do that...". Sigh.



And since I assume his problem is that wowsigs are "ugly", I'm not sure how seeing a broken link icon is an improvement...

1. More smileys. Many, many more smileys.

2. 120 x 120 avatards

3. Premium only: block user

4. Search by username

5. Custom sigs fir premium (with the option to not be able to see them, of course)

Edited, Fri Jan 6 00:26:34 2006 by DodoBird