Internet connectivity problem

[JD]

Dude!!!
The "weird looking" nameservers are the free nameservers provided
by NON OTHER THAN GOOGLE!!!!

Say "Thank you GOOGLE" :) :)


On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Gerhard Magnus <magnus at agora.rdrop.com>wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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