You may have found yourself in this predicament – you or your ISP have changed some of your domain name server settings for your website, email or similar service and you cannot yet access the new resource when you try. Part of the process you can control and part you cannot. These changes when well planned will occur very quickly on the internet side of things but your local computer may need some help to recognize the new settings. That is the purpose of this article.
Who is it for specifically?
This information will be very useful for anyone running Windows who has recently made changes to their website or email server DNS settings. The instructions are written for Windows 7, but the commands work on NT and above.
Accessing an administrative command (cmd) prompt
There are three commands total but to access them you first need a cmd prompt running as administrator. To do that go into the start menu/all programs/accessories and find Command Prompt. Right click Command prompt and choose “run as administrator” this may require some account credentials of an administrative user on the machine or domain.
Running the commands to refresh all of your local DNS cache
Once you are in the administrative cmd window you will need to type the following three commands:
- ipconfig /flushdns
- net stop “dns client”
- net start “dns client”
Close and re-open your browser and test
Once that is done, you can try to access the resource where the changes were being made. If it still doesn’t resolve it is not on your computer. Simply run the commands again periodically and test. This will ensure that you will get updated dns settings each time.
Questions? Comments? Leave them in the comment section below.