DouglasWard.net Random ramblings from an IT Director

While managing the network infrastructure at our Annual Conference I have run across a weird redirect issue.  All of the computers in the News Room running Windows XP, Vista and 7 started redirecting to MySpace pages.  In the beginning it was redirecting to an actual profile.  After an hour or so the website started returning 404 errors (as if they had removed the profile).  We first noticed the issue yesterday but dismissed it as a glitch.  This morning the issue has arisen in full force.  I can’t find much online about the problem but here is what we have done that seems to clear it up for us.  I believe that this issue is spreading through the social networks but I cannot confirm it yet.  Since we are running nearly all of our news coverage through those websites we are sitting ducks.  The latest antivirus definition files from multiple vendors doesn’t seem to help either.  Please be sure to comment if you have any additional info.

Affected browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.  All are running the latest patches as of this writing.

Steps to remediate for Windows XP users:

1. Start – Run
2. Run the program “cmd” for the command line
3. Enter “ipconfig /flushdns” and hit Enter
4. Restart the browser

Steps to remediate for Windows Vista/7 users:

1. Start – All Programs – Accessories
2. Right click on command prompt and select Run As Administrator
3. Enter “ipconfig /flushdns” and hit Enter
4. Restart the browser

I have seen some small issues with Ubuntu and Mac laptops.  We resolved those by dumping the browser cache, restarting the network connections and restarting the browser.  I will post an update as I learn more.

Update: June 10th @ 5:24 PM

I’ve done a good bit of googling and found out that the issue is most likely linked to our brand spanking new Linksys WRT320N wireless router (relevant threads can be found here and here).  Apparently that entire family of routers has trouble with DNS requests.  I didn’t see a sticker on the box when I bought it that said something along the lines of “I suck at DNS.”  Who knew?  I updated the firmware at our dinner break.  We’ll see how it goes from here.