hosts file handles specified domain but not a longer path

Trying to resolve a website domain to localhost for development purposes. I am developing on a Wordpress Installation which has some inherent hardcoded redirects to the domain it is installed on. So I need to be able to resolve the domain it is for to my local environment to do development. I am on a windows machine using WAMP as my development server. I have added this line into my hosts file:

127.0.0.1        localhost
127.0.0.1        www.example.com

This works great when I visit www.example.com I get the expected WAMP application screen. The problem is when I try to visit the Wordpress Installation at www.example.com/blogs, this does not get resolved to my local environment, it takes me to the public facing site.

The strange thing is that this is not a problem on all computers I have it working on an XP and W7 computer. But it is also not working on two other W7 computers and some old computer I am unsure of OS for.

Can anyone provide some insight on what might be happening?

Update - Things that I have tried to avoid the possibility of caching: hard refreshing with Ctrl+F5, manually clearing the browser cache, using multiple browsers, clearing the dns cache with ipconfig /flushdns

Andy

Posted 2012-06-15T18:05:16.757

Reputation: 1

Answers

Sounds like you are getting a cached response. Have you tried Ctrl+F5 after browsing to www.example.com/blogs ?

Paul George

Posted 2012-06-15T18:05:16.757

Reputation: 361

Yes i have tried a hard refresh with Ctrl+F5, clearing the browser cache, using different browsers and flushing the dns from the command line. – Andy – 2012-06-15T18:49:34.673

Some ideas : Try looking at the http request in fiddler2 and verify that what you see happening is indeed happening. Also, are all or some of these machines on a domain? Is there any VPN's going on from these machines? What browser(s) are you seeing this behaviour in, is it all browsers on the affected machine? Are there any proxies configured? – Paul George – 2012-06-15T20:11:57.670

No VPN's, WAMP is being run locally on all of the laptops, the browser you check doesn't seem to matter, so all browsers. I looked into the possiblity of some interference from a Network Proxy but not finding anything wrong. – Andy – 2012-06-18T14:40:52.853