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Once I saw that, I remembered that the last time BladeForums did a major upgrade and changed their IP address, my ISP was very slow in picking up the change, which prevented me from getting to BladeForums by URL, so I'd added that entry to my HOSTS file. I commented out the 216.26.177.84 entry and flushed my DNS again, then tried another ping. The ping still times out, but now www.bladeforums.com resolves to IP: 199.85.240.180 and I can reach Bladeforums just fine using Firefox (I wonder why ping doesn't work??).

Some places program their routers to not accept or respond to pings. They can be used as a DoS (denial of service) attack. I know we don't allow pings on many of our external facing routers.

KS JYD #93 "Life's too short..."