I have been using my company laptop at home on my own network. The following thing has happened to me twice now, on two different days.
I have needed a URL and guessed at it instead of searching. I have guessed incorrectly, and come up with one that does not exist. Instead of seeing the regular "can't be found" message, or alternative listings from Yahoo, I have been directed to my company's homepage.
A few facts:
- I have not been connected to VPN at the time
- this has only happened since our company's site was redesigned/relaunched. I have only visited the site (voluntarily) about 4 times at the most
- when I take the same laptop into the office, connect through the network, and try to go to the same (non-existent) URL, I get the usual "cannot be found" message
- I told one of our network guys, and he says it's happened to him recently too, on test laptops that he has in his office. He said he wasn't curious enough to look into it when it happened to him
- the company site isn't my homepage, Yahoo is.
Has anyone ever seen anything like this? I'd appreciate any feedback you might have.
I can't get it to work, so I am going to have one of the guys try it with me tomorrow in the office. I'll let you know either way.
<blockquote>Quote
<hr>I have needed a URL and guessed at it instead of searching. I have guessed incorrectly, and come up with one that does not exist. Instead of seeing the regular "can't be found" message, or alternative listings from Yahoo, I have been directed to my company's homepage. <hr></blockquote>
Does that happen for every non-existent URL, or just a specific one? Is the non-existent domain name owned by your company? (e.g., a misspelling)
You can check the ownership of a domain at a site like whois.net.
Thanks for your reply.
It's happening for at least 2 URLs. I don't remember the one that it happened with first, but the one that caused me to post was www.nus.ie</a>. It's not happening with all non-existent URLs, in fact I just tried www.testingdh.com and got to the live seach page, which gave me this message: We did not find any results for www.testingdh.com.<BR><BR>nus.ie is not owned by anyone, it's available. It's not close to the URL for my company site, either.
Well, here's an update: I was able to flush the DNS cache here in the office with no problem. Last night it would not work, despite repeated efforts. So my next step will be to try www.nus.ie at home tonight on my own network and see what happens. I'll keep you posted.
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