Is Your Adobe Reader Crashing?

Is Your Adobe Reader Crashing?

 

 

This started happening to me a couple of years ago. I fixed it by creating a rule in Windows Firewall to block AcroRd32.exe from accessing the Internet. 

That works, but there are a lot of other rules in my firewall - so many that sometimes I have to turn it off to make things work that I want to work. 

So, I have started finding more elegant ways of stopping what I want to stop, while allowing other stuff to get through.

This is where I began looking into exactly what is going on.

Using Currports I found that AcroRd32 was trying to access a couple of different IP addresses:


Exploring this on the net reveals that Adobe most often is looking for these two FQDNs (fully qualified domain names):  Acroipm.adobe.com.edgesuite.net and Acroipm.adobe.com.

When you run each one of these through tracert or ping at the command prompt they do indeed turn up our IP addresses from above:


When I plug that first IP (203.177.217.41) into IPNetInfo it does not return Adobe:

Instead it returns the CDN (content delivery network), akamai.net, that is hosting the Adobe service. Same for the other address.

So how do we block Adobe from communicating with these addresses to stop the shutdowns?

We use the hosts file.

You need to open hosts in notepad with admin privileges. The easiest way to do that is open notepad, pin it to the taskbar, close notepad, then right click on it on the taskbar while holding down shift and then select "Run as administrator."

Then you need to open hosts from the file menu of notepad.

You can find the host file on the drive hosting your Windows installation under Windows\System32\drivers\etc

And make sure that you select "all files (*.*)" because the hosts file does not have an extension.

We want to block these Adobe domains using 0.0.0.0 for IPv4 and :: for IPv6 and that looks like this in our hosts file:

Now when Adobe Reader sends a request to the system to resolve either of those two FQDNs the hosts file will block the request, which looks like this:

Adobe Reader is no longer able to reach the two IP addresses that were causing the shutdowns.