Akamai hosts images, etc, in a geographically load-balanced cluster of servers. A site like The New York Times, or CNN, or...might host an image there, referencing http://a###.X.akamai.net/, and when your machine requests that image the IP address Akamai returns will be the server geographically closest to you. It's a way of speeding up load time for media content, be it images, downloadable files, movies, or whatever else. They're very heavily used. If you look here: http://www.akamai.com/en/html/about/customers.html you'll discover that if you block them, quite a bit of the internet is going to look really funny. -----Original Message----- From: Anders Johansson [mailto:andjoh@rydsbo.net] Sent: Wed 9/21/2005 8:34 PM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] NOVELL: Cool Solutions: Pay No Shipping for SUSE Linux 10 - Limited Time Offer! On Thursday 22 September 2005 01:43, Felix Miata wrote:

get a "The connection was refused when attempting to contact a248.e.akamai.net." dialog. Akamai.net is an ad image server that my hosts file blocks.

Um, akamai is the biggest file server company on the Internet. They serve files for everyone. Windows Update is hosted on akamai. If your hosts file really blocks them, there will be loads of stuff you can't get to.