jazzsequence

so we had a cable network outage yesterday and also the day before. it’s up. ok. after it got up, though, one of our computers could browse the internet and the other couldn’t. i was quickly (quickly only because i’ve been doing this stuff for way too long) able to determine there was a problem with the dns (domain name service) servers…each server/website/computer/whatever has an ip address which it needs to connect to the internet. websites have the same ip address (generally) all the time. they register on a netwrok of dns servers which translate that ip address into www.google.com, or whatever their domain is. if there’s a problem with your dns server, you can be connected to the internet, but no pages will come up and it looks like you aren’t online. the easiest way to test if there’s a dns problem is to ping the ip address of a website and see if you get replies. if you get replies to the ip but not the url, then you’ve got a dns issue. i don’t have google’s ip memorized (i’m not quite that geeky), but since the other computer wasn’t having problems i was able to do this pretty simply and determine the problem.

i grabbed the dns server addresses off our router and hard-coded them (manually entered them) on the computer. once the change was saved, worked fine.

this morning i come and notice that my bit torrents don’t appear to have moved all night and say there’s some kind of network problem, but all the lights on the modem are on. i try to refresh a web page and i get nothing. on either computer. i try a couple more times and eventually the computer with the hard-coded addresses randomly starts working, but the one that didn’t have a problem yesterday still isn’t. garrrrrr.

so i google comcast dns servers, with the assumption that i will get a boring list of server ip addresses and i can just change my dns servers. instead i get a series of blogs and forum posts about comcast’s crappy dns servers, dns server outages, and dns server lags. across the board, everyone posting about it is saying to use verizon’s dns servers, so i’ve set both computers to use those.

still working the kinks out of the new service, which is a lot easier since i’ve done internet tech support for 2 years. despite the minor foul-ups, i think i’m still happier with cable than dsl…when the service went down yesterday, i saw a comcast cherry-picker working on the lines when i came home for lunch. when i left for work again, i saw a second truck. i’m fairly confident that when the service goes down, they find out about it pretty quick and are able to go out and fix the problem (whether it gets fixed for real or not may be another issue), possibly even before i report it — which is a huge step above qwest and dsl in general.

related posts:

• >A Public Service Announcement to the Blogosphere…
• >cable is a go
• >day 4