my computer is blocking an ip address

etresoft brings up a good point.

To do so:

• Open Finder
• From the Finder menu bar, select Go > Go to Folder...
• Enter /etc, and then, press Return
• The contents of the etc folder should appear.
• Look for the file named: hosts
• Right-click on this file, and then, select Open With... > TextEdit

Below is the default version of this file.

What's being asked is there any additional entries other than what is shown above. If there is, and one of them is the IP address of this site it may be pointing to the wrong location and the entry would need to be deleted.

The hosts file is something your Mac will look at first BEFORE using DNS.

The DNS server is 192.168.1.254 from my systems network info. The ethernet IP is 192.168.1.73.

... and they should NOT match. However, I suspect the validity of your DNS server's IP address as this is a local private IP address. The only way this would be correct is if this address is also the same as your local network router's address.

Please post an image of your network setting from System Preferences > Network

For example, here is mine from my Mac mini:

FYI ... the IP Address is the local IP address that is assigned to my Mac mini by my network's router. My router's address is also listed. Finally, the DNS servers are listed as well and I use the OpenDNS servers for my network, not the ones my ISP provides me.

janburg wrote:

I think you're on to something here. I remember doing something with this quite a while back... All the other sites I resell hosting for have "#" in front of an IP address, except for the bankruptcy site. So I have to go into terminal and ????

...add a "#" in front of the IP address.

You can boot into recovery mode & do a test…

About macOS Recovery - Apple Support

Reboot and hold cmd+R at startup. Wait for the list of options to appear. Select 'get help online'. That will open Safari. Test your sites. Be sure you have a Wi-Fi connection.

If the sites work you know that your Mac can access them & can also work with the current router config. From there you can reboot & continue looking at various network configuration settings. If the Mac still fails it seems possible that something external is blocking your Mac (or hardware has failed but I can't see how that would only effect one site).

The hosting company suggested I do a pin and trace route, they say I have a 100% loss on these, so no data is going out. I have no idea why this would happen, or how to make that site appear again on my computer. Any ideas out there?

I assume that they had asked you to perform two separate tests: 1) Perform a Ping, and 2) Perform a traceroute to this particular website. Both are methods to see if your computer can actually reach this site through the Internet maze. Not getting a response or a failure of either does not necessarily mean that you can't reach it as some web sites purposely do NOT respond to this type of testing ... as as security measure.

However, there is one other test that you can try and that is to try pinging to this website by its IP address and not its URL. To find the site's IP address with your MacBook Pro, just do the following:

Note: The following step-by-step is from macOS Sierra. I do not have an OS X Yosemite Mac handy to give you the exact steps with it. It may be, if my memory serves me, that you can find the Network Utility in the Utilities folder and can access it directly from there on your Mac.

• Click on the Apple icon in the OS X menu bar.
• Click on About This Mac.
• Select System Report...
• From the System Information's menu bar, select Window > Network Utility
• From the Network Utility, select the Lookup tab.
• Enter the URL for the website that you are trying to access in Safari.
• Select Lookup
• You should get a response that will provide the IP address for this website.

  When I just tried it, I got 205.134.250.94

• Run another Ping again, but this time, use the IP address that you got from Lookup.

Was the Ping successful this time?

Thanks for the image capture.

In your case, your computer is getting its IP addresses from what looks like, a non-Apple router. No problem. Your router's local IP address is: 192.168.1.254. Again, no problem.

The DNS server IP address is the same as your router's and is grayed out. This typically means that the router controls the DNS settings and is telling your computer to use its settings to access the DNS servers. This may or may not be a bad thing either. Most likely, your router is configured to use your ISP's DNS servers.

However, if you want more control on the DNS servers that you use, you could change the DNS IP address to that / those used by other DNS services. Again, in my case, I use the OpenDNS servers ... which, is now a part of the Cisco family of products. I do so because I want more control of my DNS services.

I also see that your Mac is being assigned an IPv6 address. This is the future wave and eventually all traffic over the Internet will be using this level of IP addressing as the current IPv4 addresses have been exhausted. Just be aware that the role-out of IPv6 has experienced some "growing pains" and can cause issues similar to yours.

You have an option to disable IPv6 on your Mac by changing a setting in System Preferences > Network to see if this will help.

To do so:

• System Preferences > Network > Wi-Fi > Advanced > TCP/IP
• Change the "Configure IPv6" option to: Link-local only
• Click on OK to save the new configuration.

The "Your IP" would be the Public-side IP address of your router. Most likely, it is the one being provided to you by your ISP.

The error you got would indicate to me that you may be having issues with the DNS service. Think of this service as the Internet's Yellow Pages. It maintains a mapping between URLs and IP addresses. Every time you enter a URL for a website in a web browser, the first thing the browser does is contact a DNS server to get the associated IP address of that site. All traffic going over the Internet uses IP addresses, not URLs to find the requested destination server.

By default, your ISP will provide you with one or two DNS servers. These servers' IP addresses will be listed in System Preferences > Network > Ethernet or Wi-Fi (depending on how you connect your Mac to your local network) > DNS Server.

These should be the same IP addresses for the other devices that you use on your local network ... and have success accessing this particular website. If they are not could be the problem.

The DNS name server numbers on Whois are correct for that website. But if they were wrong, it should apply to all people looking to that website, not just my computer, right?

It's not the DNS servers that the website uses, but the one your computer does. Sorry for any confusion that I may have caused you. I was interested to find out what DNS servers your ISP has provided you. That is what you can find out in System Preferences > Network, etc. on your MacBook Pro that is having difficulty finding that particular site.

I wanted to know if the DNS servers found for this Mac matched that on the others that you use. If not, that may be the problem.

As I mentioned earlier, DNS is the Internet's version of a phone book. It keeps updated listings of the mappings between a URL (i.e., http://gosomewhere.com) and that site's IP address.

If DNS is not working properly, you will find that you cannot access websites by using their respective URLs, but can if you enter their actual IP addresses. This should work with IPv4 ... but not necessarily with IPv6 IF the site is not enabled to work with the newer addressing scheme.

This issue can also be caused by your web browser's settings. Depending on which your use, it may be possible to reset that browser to its "factory default" settings to see if that helps.

But, before even doing so, have you tried using another browser on your computer? I believe you mentioned a few others, but don't know if you actually tried them.