bitly going to error page

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I have a somewhat strange problem. 2 computers (1 XP – yeah I know it’s old but it works)(1 Win7). Both run same version of FireFox — settings same in both. Both run Comodo firewall. Both run Vipre antivirus. Both use same DNS servers. BUT … when I click on a link to bit.ly 1 computer (Win7) always goes to a bitly error page. The other computer (XP) works fine. So far I have not been able to find anything in Win 7 machine which would contribute to this problem. Written to bitly support, but so far no solutions…. Al

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1) Can you get to http://69.58.188.40 on the Windows 7 computer?

2) What about https://bitly.com?

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Yes on both of them.

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Ok. If you temporarily change the DNS servers to

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

can you then get to http://bit.ly

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Still the same problem. … Weird.

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Still the same problem. … Weird.

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By the way … the problem is the same out of Chrome and IE as well as FF.

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What happens if you go to unblockanything.com, type in bit.ly (after the “http://www.”) and then click “Browse”?

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Goes to bitly home page. That works anyway. My problem is clicking on a bit.ly link in Tweetdeck, Firefox or other app goes to error page at bitly. … copying the bit.ly link into the unblock site makes the link work correctly. … So what is blocking link from one computer and not from the other?

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Both computers use same ip # which is assigned to router.

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So what is blocking link from one computer and not from the other?

Don’t know yet, it’s a bit hard to see what it might be from here. 🙂

Click the Start orb, type cmd and press [Enter]. At the cmd prompt, type dir c:windowssystem32driversetchosts and press [Enter]. To the right of the date and time stamp on the HOSTS file is a number which is the byte size of the file. What size is it?

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870 bytes.

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Just looked in that hosts file. And it has two entries. One for bit.ly and one for j.mp to the same ip#.

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Perhaps, you could take a look at THIS MS article, and reset the HOSTS.txt file back to its defaults.

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Yep, the original Windows 7 HOSTS file is 822 bytes … meaning yours has something added to it.

Here is a copy of the original:

Code:

# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server
#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
#	127.0.0.1       localhost
#	::1             localhost

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Went to Microsoft support page … ran the fixit file … and that cleared the problem. Not sure how the extra entries arrived there … but apparently they were pointing in the wrong direction. … Guess I’ll have to look up Google and see what the hosts file is supposed to be for. Never even looked at one before this.

Thanks for your help.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file

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And thanks for that one too. Guess I learn something new every day. At least I hope I do.

Have a great weekend.

Al

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You’re welcome; and thanks, you too. 🙂

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Glad we could help. 🙂

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