Eddie On Everything

How to clear your DNS cache in Windows XP

September 5, 2006 on 12:55 pm | In windows xp |

I spent the last 10 or 15 minutes banging my head against the wall, trying to figure out why a new subdomain that I set up on my hosting account (via cpanel) wasn’t working.

There were really 2 problems here — first, cpanel spits out an error message saying that the DNS zone could not be added

Bind reloading on wave using rndc zone: […] Error reloading bind on wave: rndc: connection to remote host closed This may indicate that the remote server is using an older version of the command protocol, this host is not authorized to connect, or the key is invalid.

Which would of course make any rational person think that the domain wasn’t added, right? WRONG. Cpanel always spits out this error message, even when the add was successful.

The second problem was that I was still unable to view the site on my local computer running XP, which made me think that the DNS entry wasn’t set up correctly. WRONG.

To fix this problem, I simply had to clear the Windows XP DNS cache.
To do this, go to Start->Run and type “ipconfig /flushdns” .

(That’s ipconfig-space-slash-flushdns)

Something will briefly flash on your screen, and the DNS cache will now be cleared.