Saving the changes

In order for the changes you make to become effective, you must save the changes by using the Save Changes command, or by pressing the Ctrl+S key.

Keep in mind, however, that some network software keeps the mapping of the host names to the IP addresses in a cache, and the cache may not become updated when you save the change. (The details of updating the cache are program-specific and depend on each program's the implementation). This means that although the new mappings of the host names to the IP addresses become effective immediately after you save the changes, some network programs may still use the old information, as it was stored in their cache. If this causes a problem with your software, you can usually just restart it to force it to update its cache. In the worst case scenario, you may need to restart Windows in order the new host name information to take effect, but such situations are rare.

Another issue that may prevent your Internet programs from using the updated host name information is the web browser cache, where the web pages of the recently visited web sites is stored between the sessions, to speed up the loading of the pages that were already loaded by the browser during the previous visit to a web site. If the browser has saved a web page form a web site in its cache, and later you have mapped the host name of that web site to a different IP address, the browser may not detect the change and keep displaying the web page from its cache, even though it must be fetched from a different server now.

To solve this problem, HostName Commander prompts you to clean up the web browser cache for the web sites for which you have modified the host name information.

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