CIP

Introduction

(Don't know anything about the net? Don't know what a hosts cache is? Click here for "CIP for Dummies.")

CIP manages your hosts file. A hosts file is used to resolve IPs for the URLs you attempt to access.

CIP is by far the fastest, most interactive, and most feature-rich product of its kind on the market today.

CIP is alone in being able to get the "secondary URLs" embedded in your web pages. Secondary embedded URLs amount to many times the DNS time spent accessing the primary servers.

CIP is also alone in intelligently avoiding URLs which implement dynamic IP allocation - those whose traffic warrants such a scheme. If your current IP checker simply inserts the first IP it finds for a given URL, it is effectively locking you in at a connection that might be overloaded and thereby slower or even inaccessible. CIP detects automatically when remote servers implement dynamic IP allocation and removes their corresponding URLs from your cache.

Normally a browser will have to go through DNS to find the IP number for a web resource, and this takes time. By putting your URLs and IPs in your hosts file, you speed up your browser, make better use of your online time, and get where you're going a lot faster.

CIP runs off the system tray and will automatically find and open the hosts file in use by your system if it's there.

And, as stated, CIP is incredibly fast - no other product on the market coming even close: CIP resolves between 1,000 and 2,000 URLs per minute - that's 30 URLs per second or better, depending on your modem speed.

How to run CIP

You import your (or anyone else's) bookmarks to your hosts cache.

And you do the same with your (or anyone else's) favorites.

As bookmarks and favorites are most often stored on a per-user basis, this becomes vital. Most IP checkers do not understand this at all. CIP does.

You can even import URLs from alternate hosts files. On multi-boot machines this can be essential.

You add and edit your URLs with the Add/Edit dialog.

If you're not working with your system hosts file, you export it there when you're ready.

When you're ready to validate your URLs, select the ones you wish to validate and hit the Go button.

You can also edit your hosts file as pure text. CIP lets you set the text editor you wish to use, fire it up within CIP, and coordinate editing operations with it.

You can even browse directly to your URLs from within CIP.

CIP now works in conjunction with GD to retrieve your secondary URLs: enable the GD button on the toolbar or select GD from the Edit menu and all remote URLs polled by GD will be automatically added and sorted in your list.

Finally, CIP can be run in "Auto Mode": by appending "/Auto" or "-Auto" (case-insensitive) to the command line CIP will automatically verify all URLs in the system hosts cache, save the results, and exit.

Disk image size: 14,336 bytes.