Unable to access site without DNS

[aubn8r32]

Hello,
I was tasked by my manager to setup a kiosk machine that is going to be used by non-employees to take an online exam on one of our workstations. I was told to give it a static IP with no DNS or WINS entries and to edit the hosts file with the IP and website address. The site also uses Flash so I installed that.
However, I can access the site but the page does not fully load using a static IP without DNS. As soon as I add DNS entries in, you can access the page and it loads fine. The whole site uses Flash and it is installed locally. Is there a way to find out why it will not work without DNS. He wanted it setup that way so they can not browse the Internet and they can only access that particular site.

 

[Law]

Well, most web site don't just have 1 web server, many other things are located on different servers or domain. So using a HOST file will most certainly not work unless you add every IP to domain entry. The reason you use DNS is to not deal with HOST file in the first place.

Take for example yahoo.com, if you put an entry for yahoo.com with it's associated IP address in the HOST file. When the user type www.yahoo.com into the web browser, the computer default behavior is to look at it's HOST file first before contacting a DNS server. It will try to look for an entry of www.yahoo.com and will not find it, because the only entry is yahoo.com and they are two different entry to the HOST file. If the user type yahoo.com into the browser it will work. If the user clicks on a link that goes to email.yahoo.com, it will not work, because there is no entry, you must also put an entry for every link. Good luck

 

[aubn8r32]

We thought that it might be pulling from another site like you said to get the whole page to load so we ran netstat and it only shows the one site? Our other offices are going to have to do the same thing. I will post once they find a solution if anyone is curious.

 

[aubn8r32]

We found a solution finally. Installed a DNS capture software and we found the site address that it was trying to load. Added that site and IP to the hosts file and it works.

 

[Law]

We found a solution finally. Installed a DNS capture software and we found the site address that it was trying to load. Added that site and IP to the hosts file and it works.

Nslookup? ping works too. I use proxy services to filter website if you are interested to know. You can use Squid to filter website and control what user can access. It makes it more manageable you know, so you don't have to enter IP address and domain name all the time into the HOST file if you need users to access other website.

Ezproxy is free and good on individual computers if you have no need for a server. http://www.lavasoftware.net/

 

[aubn8r32]

Thanks for the info Law!