Clear DNS Resolver Cache

I ran into a rather odd problem the other day after using a hotspot at a local cafe. The hotspot uses a captive portal system that every 45 minutes requires you to re-login. This is to prevent people from aiming a high gain antenna at the cafe and using it as free bandwidth for p2p. What the hotspot does is that after 45 minutes, all dns requests automatically get responded to with the hotspot login page. The problem I am having is that ever since leaving the cafe, I keep on trying to visit sites and end up getting forwarded to the hotspot login page, even on my own network. It seems that Windows CE in its great wisdom has cached these entries and doesn't want to expire them. I tried soft resetting, associating to different networks, manually specifying a dns server, etc. I also tried using ipconfig /flushdns to flush the dns resolver cache, but it appears that the version of ipconfig on my Netbook Pro doesn't understand this command (if there is an equivalent command, I would love to hear it). Anyone have some words of wisdom? More and more I am encountering some pretty big oversights in Windows CE's networking implementation.

wow, strange... did you dive into the registry yet?

let us know whether there was a solution or not..

Yes, been mucking about the registry, at the very least Windows CE doesn't put that info in the same location as on desktop windows boxes. I deleted a bunch of keys that seemed to be related and also deleted every temp file I could find in the windows subdirectory and tried everything else I could think of doing. Something seems to have worked, as I am no longer encountering the problem, but I am not sure which was the solution. It would be nice to know for the communities sake and also so I don't go tearing my hair out the next time I visit an internet cafe.

No words of wisdom from any of you longtime ce gurus? I am surprised that this hasn't come up here, before. Getting bogus entries into the DNS resolver cache seems to have been a problem for quite a while (I found references to the same problem in Win CE 2!). Apparently early CE devices set the time to live on cache entries to 0, meaning they would never expire!

Edited by Rocketman 2006-04-18 7:28 AM

i've never had this problem even though i do visit such internet cafes with a login page etc sometimes. used CE3+ devices. so no experience with older ones, i used them for wlan only at home.

i really don't know why it didn't clear itself in your case... would be nice to know what helped..

You have to be careful in case it is querying against HKLM\Comm\Tcpip\Hosts. It has been known for resolution to get jammed in there, leading to this exact issue.
Most likely this was the result of the Internet Cache rather than the DNS resolver, CE's is pretty weak next to mainstream Windows.

I checked that particular registry branch and there is nothing there. There are no keys present, at all.