ye olde hosts file

I have a hosts file on at least two of my crunchers, telling them to always go to georgem's IP for [whatever the server name is for downloads]. A couple of hours ago, I opened the file and commented out that line on one machine, with no effect. It still has a big pile of stuck downloads. But then I went and did the same on another and faster than I could switch over to Boinc Manager, the downloads were flying through at speeds approaching 60KBps. It had a bigger backlog than the other and got all of them in under ten minutes.

Questions: Is it still a good idea to have a hosts file? Should it point to georgem or to the other one (vader, I think, without checking the SSP)? Is it possible that commenting out that line caused the downloads to speed up? If so, why didn't it work for the other host? Would it work if I restarted the computer or something? (I'd rather not do that.) Or is it just a coincidence that all those downloads suddenly went through right then?

Facts which may help in answering these: the host that sped up runs Win7-64, the one that didn't runs WinXP-Pro 32.

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

Would it work if I restarted the computer or something? (I'd rather not do that.)

Would it work if I restarted the computer or something? (I'd rather not do that.)

That or flush the DNS cache.
On the command line,
ipconfig /flushdns

Yeah, usually changes to the HOSTS file are immediate, but failing that, a /flushdns will do the trick most of the time.

Avira AV makes the HOSTS file read-only (and I assume a lot of the other common mainstream ones do, too).

Before the servers got re-arranged a few months back, we had .13 and .18 to choose from. .13 almost always worked for me and was fast, whilst .18 was super slow and would time-out mid-transfer. So I had .13 in my HOSTS file. After the servers got moved around, I noticed I was having an issue, so I just commented the line out and let DNS do its job and it's been fine since.


I don't really think you need to manually pick the download servers unless you are troubleshooting and trying to diagnose a problem. If one server doesn't work very well, wait less than 5 minutes and DNS will switch over to the other one.
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Linux laptop uptime: 1484d 22h 42m
Ended due to UPS failure, found 14 hours after the fact