hosts file... strange lookup issue... please advise....

 

Hey guys....

 

I'm running vmware on my laptop on which is a WinXP guest machine. This VM machine is my web develpment area.

 

I've setup the hosts file on the physical machine with an entry for the virtual machine.

 

    192.168.174.128    www.mywebsite.com     mywebsite.com

 

Where 192.168.174.128 is the IP of the virtual machince. I can ping the IP without issues. However, if I ping the web domain address it tries to resolve the actual address from the internet, rather than using the entry in the hosts file.


p:\>ping www.mywebsite.com
Pinging mywebsite.com http://208.87.33.151 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 208.87.33.151:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

 

I would like it to ping the virtual machine instead.

 

If i remove the .com suffix in the hosts file,

 

           192.168.174.128    mywebsite

 

then it works, and I can ping the virtual machine.


p:\>ping mywebsite

Pinging mywebsite [192.168.75.128] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.75.128: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.75.128: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.75.128: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.75.128: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128

Ping statistics for 192.168.75.128:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 2ms, Average = 0ms

 

If i add the .com to the end in the hosts file

 

           192.168.174.128    mywebsite.com

 

then once again, it tries to ping the internet address rather than using the hosts file


p:\>ping mywebsite.com

Pinging mywebsite.com [208.87.33.151] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 208.87.33.151:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

 

 

I've ruled out VMWare as the issue.... it looks like Symantec AntiVirus is trying to protect me !!

 

How can I turn this off ?

 

I'm running Symantec AntiVirus 10.2.2.2000. With the latest virus defintion file : 1/19/2010 rev 18

 

My goal is to enter the URL into a browser and to connect to Apache on the virtual machine.

 

Any ideas ??

 

Cheers

A