Internet connectivity problem

[Gerhard Magnus]

I've just come through a strange (to me) Internet connectivity problem 
that might be interesting to some. Although my DSL service comes through 
CenturyLink I've chosen to keep my ISP at a local company. Last Friday I 
lost Internet service. I couldn't connect to any website but strangely, 
some files I'd been downloading continued to come through all the way to 
completion. (I should have seen this as a clue.) I cycled the modem and 
called CenturyLink, as sometimes their automated line check clears 
Internet problems. But this time it didn't. As I was able to connect to 
both the modem and the router through my browser, and the modem status 
panel showed I was connected to both the phone company broadband and my 
ISP, I assumed the problem was with the ISP and would have to wait for a 
resolution until Monday.

Perhaps I called the ISP too early, because the person I spoke to was 
not a tech. She kept telling me everything was fine on their end and 
that I needed to talk to Centurylink about the problem. So the 
run-around began. I was especially dreading this part because talking to 
CenturyLink invariably means a long interval with someone in customer 
service at a call center in India.

I'll spare you the details of details of the incredbily frustrating 
session that followed other than mentioning that the nice person on the 
other end of the line was obviously following a tree diagram of scripts 
in which anything I said had some reasonable answer that (1) didn't do 
me any good and (2) suggested that the problem was all mine. (The 
fascinating film "Compliance" features a parody of this technique as 
used by a man pretending to be a cop on the phone.) I'd learned from 
previous sessions with the telephone company that linux doesn't exist 
for them, so I worked from one of my boxes running Windows XP. 
Invariably there came the dreaded moment when the customer service 
representative said, "Do you see a button labled 'Start' at the bottom 
left corner of your screen?"

Anyway, the end of all this routine was her suggesting that I contact 
the ISP again and have them set up a conference call with CenturyLink. 
Listening to a pair of customer service representatives each trying to 
blame the other would at least be amusing!

As much time had passed, I was finally able to reach a tech at my ISP. 
We methodically went through the entries on the modem status page. The 
fault turned out to be a DNS problem. The two DNS addresses on the list 
looked unfamiliar. The ones I'd hardcoded into my network properties (as 
originally instructed by the ISP) and had been using for years had 
changed. The phone company, for reasons of its own, had suddenly started 
using new DNS addresses -- and weird-looking ones too, that I at first 
thought were fake: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Apart from learning one more thing to look out for and being grateful 
for an ISP small enough that I could talk with a real person who 
actually knew something, I'd be curious to know if anyone has had a 
similar problem or any insight into what happened here. Is it better to 
have DSN addresses set dynamically rather than hard-coded?

Thanks for the conversation.
Jerry