PowerSwitch

[woodpecker]

Is anyone else experiencing this? I'm getting the PS site disappearing for minutes on end, owing to "cannot find DNS server". Then it comes back for a minute or two and then drops out again. Quite frustrating.

It's the only site I use where this happens at all, and it's starting to happen a lot.

[emordnilap]

Not happened here.

But poor old Scroogle is getting a beating.

Using https://duckduckgo.com/ instead.
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The human appears to have no idea what its ideal diet should be; has self-inflicted diet-related diseases; causes extensive environmental destruction through basic food production & creates pathogenic infestations that widely infect its food supply.

[Ludwig]

[Mr. Fox]

For future reference:

Re: DNS issues, try manually setting your DNS servers to IP address 208.67.222.222 (primary) and 208.67.220.220 (secondary) - these are the OpenDNS servers - that will eliminate the possibility of your ISPs ones being borked.

[emordnilap]

[Mr. Fox]

For a great 5 min introduction to how DNS works, check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72snZctFFtA&feature=channel

At the moment, when you click a link or open a web page, your computer needs to find out the IP address of the server where that page resides. So a web address like 'www.powerswitch.com' resolves to the IP address 213.229.84.195

First, your browser has a look in it's own cache, to see if it has it already (because you've recently visited that page).

If it's not in the cache, the browser asks the Operating System (windows, ubuntu, etc) where to look it up. This is the setting in generally stored in 'network properties'. By default, the OS is usually configured to get this automatically from the internet 'gateway' (in your case, the router). This can be overridden by putting in the DNS server IP addresses I gave above, forcing the OS to go straight to that server, bypassing the router's and your ISP's DNS.

If set to look to the router for the DNS server address, it will ask the router, which will then go to the DNS server address that's buried somewhere in the settings of the router. This will usually be the IP address of your ISP's own DNS server, and again, would have probably been set automatically (or already set by the ISP if they sent you the router).

Their are two DNS server IP addresses set (primary and secondary) to give you redundancy should the first one of them 'fall over'.

Sometimes, if your ISP's DNS servers are under a heavy load or whatever, you'll fail to get the IP address - hence a 'DNS Error'.

So I'd probably leave the router set as it is, and change the DNS addresses in the OS.

To do this in WindowsXP (assuming that's what you use), go to 'network properties' > 'connection properties' (right click on the connection you use) > Highlight 'Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)' and click 'properties', then set the DNS server from 'Obtain DNS server address automatically' to '..manually' and enter the numbers and hit 'ok'. Then restart the computer. If it's currently set to 'automatically' obtain DNS settings, that's all you need to 'revert' to if you wish to undo what you did.

[emordnilap]

Thanks Mr Fox. Things are slightly less murky than they were yesterday.

So, without wishing to harp on about it (and it's also difficult to connect this with PS but you have to get information wherever you can), what are the practical implications of changing to the DNS addresses you posted? Does it, for instance, make things faster or more efficient? More secure? Less likely to be snooped upon?

Our pet computer/internet nerd lives a good distance away but always seems to know when something different is happening to our network - in fact, having him alert is a good brake on people at work taking advantage of the system: he spots P2P stuff going on straight away and 'dodgy' sites being accessed. So he might take exception to someone altering the DNS addresses.

There again, I suspect he has a lot of free time on his hands.
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The human appears to have no idea what its ideal diet should be; has self-inflicted diet-related diseases; causes extensive environmental destruction through basic food production & creates pathogenic infestations that widely infect its food supply.