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[Help] Is there some way to disable DNS in XP?


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Hello everyone,

I hope someone can shed light on this very vexing problem.

My cousin owns a business and has a PC based surveillance system that runs on Windows XP Home. She was having problems with employees getting on the PC (foolishly the PC is not located in an area where only she could have access to it) and surfing the web and the resulting mess with viruses and spyware left her system crippled. SO she called the vendor of the surveillance system. He came and cleaned up the spyware and then did something to disable web browsing on the PC. The network connection is still active, and she is able to use a VNC app to get into the PC remotely.

Neither IS nor Firefox work. In IE no matter what page is requested, a DNS error comes up. It matters not whether the IP and DNS addresses are entered into the system or whether its set to obtain these automatically. Thus if she clicks on the connection icon and goes to the Support tab and clicks on Details, no DNS addresses are visible.

Now however, she wants to enable browsing so that she can update Windows as well as the surveillance application. I have been trying to help her undo whatever the vendor did. However I have had no luck so far. I compared services that were active on a PC that has no problems accessing the Web from the same network, to services on the surveillance PC, and enabled those services which had been disabled, so that both PCs have the same services running.

Unfortunately, the vendor is no longer in business and cannot be found.

I tried googling for ways to disable web-browsing but nothing useful comes up.

The only thing I can think of is that he changed some values in the registry, perhaps the port numbers associated with web-browsing? But then what would prevent the PC from being able to get DNS addresses from the router? Its not the router because other PCs on the LAN work normally.

I'm stumped. Any ideas??

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Disabling the DNS client service will keep DNS from working, although if that's running, it'd be something else. You could check and make sure the hosts file doesn't contain any entries to block browsing as well, although it is really hard to tell what could have caused this without knowing anything else about that machine.

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Hmm, I do have one idea that might stop it

Have you tried opening a command prompt and performing a ping of say www.google.com, if that works then it's the Internet browsers that are flakey if it doesn't (and you can ping google from a working machine) then the prob is lower than that.

Also try a ping of 66.289.89.99 (Googles IP) those results will also give some info as well, i.e determining whether it's simply a DNS fault or the whole thing is having trouble

If pinging Google works then have a look in the Internet browser and see whether the proxy has been changed

Firefox is Tools - Options - Advanced - Network

IE is Tools - Internet Options - Connections - LAN Settings

If you're not sure what they're meant to be, just jump to another PC on the same network and compare

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Hmm, I do have one idea that might stop it

Have you tried opening a command prompt and performing a ping of say www.google.com, if that works then it's the Internet browsers that are flakey if it doesn't (and you can ping google from a working machine) then the prob is lower than that.

Also try a ping of 66.289.89.99 (Googles IP) those results will also give some info as well, i.e determining whether it's simply a DNS fault or the whole thing is having trouble

If pinging Google works then have a look in the Internet browser and see whether the proxy has been changed

Firefox is Tools - Options - Advanced - Network

IE is Tools - Internet Options - Connections - LAN Settings

If you're not sure what they're meant to be, just jump to another PC on the same network and compare

@cluberti, Its not the hosts file. I've checked that.

Deman,

I checked the proxy and no, its not been changed. All normal connection specific things that are readily apparent are at their default states.

Whatever it is, its preventing the PC from getting/seeing the DNS server addresses. Disabling the connection and then re-enabling it, or the physical unplugging and plugging back in of the ethernet cable does not change anything. The PC gets its LAN IP address readily, but not the DNS addresses.

I do not want to tell her that one way would be to re-install Windows, because the vendor did not leave the CD of the OS nor the surveillance application CD for her.

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Assure that the dns servers are still assigned (network connection / internet protocol / DNS servers.

Make sure that port 53 has not been blocked either in the firewall, TCP/IP filtering or via IPSEC.

Check under Group Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Template / Network / DNS Client, for valid DNS servers.

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  • 1 year later...

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