[thelist] Arguing with my ISP over DNS problem

Mark Groen mark at markgroen.com
Tue Aug 10 23:42:06 CDT 2004


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bob Haroche" <>
To: "Evolt" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: August 10, 2004 9:03 PM
Subject: [thelist] Arguing with my ISP over DNS problem

> Now I'm not claiming to be a DNS guru by any means, but all of the
> above seems to me at least to indicate that it's that the ISP's DNS
> cache or routing tables that are in error. This would not be the
first
> time that would be the case. Yet they are apparently unwilling to
> consider that possibility.
>
> Is there anything else I can do to test whether the problem is on
my
> end or on the ISP's? Thanks in advance.

Are you on a Windows XP box? One of the misguided "features" in XP
and ME is "local DNS caching" to make the browser appear to be
faster, by reducing the round trip time I suppose...

Anyhoo, I tried the usual things, Start > r > cmd > ipconfig
/flushdns and it seemed to be okay, no records when I did a ipconfig
/displaydns so everything should be hunky dorey right? Nope. Still
this machine is looking up the wrong record even though publicly on
the net the DNS had been propagated for days (since last Thursday).

Tried disabling it using the command: net stop dnscache and the
feedback was that caching had been stopped. But still no joy, getting
frustrated now and not trying to show it because I was at a clients
place of business ;-)

In the old days of Win98 when odd things like this happened I would
just remove and rebuild the TCP/IP stack and things worked itself
out, needed something that was easy enough for two other WinXP/ME
(out of a few hundred) that were having the same problem to fix by a
newbie without them freaking out that they were losing the internet
connection etc.

Long story short, I went into Control Panel > Network Settings > Lan
> TCP/IP > Properties > and changed from "automatically find DNS" to
specifying a DNS server and I put in my own name server's IP and
voila, joy again. Hoping now that the TTL (time to live -
positive/negative) for anyone else by this time has cleared out their
own cache and no more problems, the two machines in question almost
never get shut down and rebooted so isolated case?, fingers crossed
unless someone can add to this mystery.

hth!

cheers,

               Mark

MG Web Services
Web Site Hosting and Development
www.mgwebservices.ca
604-780-6917
Bowen Island, B.C., Canada










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