Blocked site -

[Matthew J. Roth]

Bob,

> I get [using the opendns name servers again]:
> 
>   [bobg at box9 ~]$ dig @8.8.8.8 +short www.newegg.com
>   208.91.197.27
>   [bobg at box9 ~]$ dig @208.67.220.220 +short www.newegg.com
>   208.91.197.27
>   [bobg at box9 ~]$ dig @12.189.32.61 +short www.newegg.com
>   208.91.197.27

The @IP tells dig which DNS server to query, so those commands are
querying Google (@8.8.8.8), OpenDNS (@208.67.220.220), and Wild Blue
(@12.189.32.61).  The fact that they all return 208.91.197.27 means
that your computers and your network are fine.

You're probably just encountering a stale DNS record.  DNS is a
distributed system with a lot of caching involved.  Due to that,
changes to DNS records do not propagate throughout the Internet
immediately.

> Perhaps they respond differently as a function of the inquiring address?

That's a plausible explanation.

> Ok that got me through to their "secure" site and I obtained the
> number they requested and sent it back to them. I'll see what they
> come up with.

Very good.  You may also want to let them know about the 208.91.197.27
response that your DNS queries were receiving.  It will work itself
out if it's a DNS change that hasn't propagated yet, but it could also
be something that they need to fix like a misconfiguration of their
authoritative name servers.

Remember to periodically try to access newegg.com without that line in
"/etc/hosts".  It's more of a workaround than an actual solution and
it will stop working if they drop the IP it references.

Regards,

Matthew Roth
InterMedia Marketing Solutions
Software Engineer and Systems Developer