Comcast DNS servers issues.

[GOAT]

Posted only for information as a possible solution for anyone having similar issues.

[GOAT]

Last Sunday night in my area as well as other areas across the country. Comcast was having severe issues with their DNS servers http:// http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/12/06/gordon-comcast-dns-outage/ resulting in no internet access for many Comcast users. It may have been related to: http:// http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-Quickly-Tackled-New-DNS-Threat-96400 or the related DNS security flaw or some other issue? However since I am using Business class Comcast my DNS servers are different from those listed for residential service yet they too were out of commission.

 

After three hours of going though the standard router/modem connections troubleshooting and waiting I finally called Comcast, waited another hour, and finally got tech support who asked a ton of questions concerning my account only to eventually inform me their DNS servers were experiencing outages.. Great! (they could have just had that on a taped reply and saved me the wait). With this knowledge I simply changed my router settings to open DNS servers and whalla I was back online.

 

I was thinking I would switch back once Comcast got their act together but in retrospect, and having doing a bit of online researching. This isn’t the first time I’ve had problems, lately it seemed my connection would reset or I would temporarily lose connection and have to reconnect quite often (even more so for any wireless devices on my home network). For play station users.. if you have ever got the “disconnected from PSN network DNS error†message than you know what I’m talking about. More searching and I found out that Comcast’s DNS servers do indeed reset five to ten minutes a day quite often. I also found out that Comcast is migrating all their customers to DNSSEC over the next few months. If you like you don’t have to wait and can manually configure them check here for info. http:// http://www.dnssec.comcast.net/ .

 

For now though I’ll pass, since after changing to OPEN DNS servers I have found them to be both more reliable as well as less problem prone along with a notice in increased speeds by everyone in my family. So I’ll continue to use them. Some say that open DNS servers redirect searches or else spy on your URL visit log.. but hey if they do? Then I haven’t noticed it and I’m sure its nothing Comcast doesn’t do also. In fact I’m sure Comcast spy’s on its users probably more.

 

At any rate I did switch back once Comcast had fixed the problem, but guess what.. several speed test indicated they were still slower and less reliable than the open DNS servers. You can find a list of them here. http:// http://theos.in/windows-xp/free-fast-public-dns-server-list/ . I tried Google’s but decided on OPEN DNS as the better choice. I didn’t try any of the others however.

[GeneralSarcasm]

use opendns, http://www.opendns.com. It's free. You can simply plug in their dns servers and go, or you can create an account and actually limit what types of sites it will resolve for your ip. For instance I use opendns at home, and I have my router giving out the opendns dns servers to all the machines in the house. I tell opendns to not allow different categories, like adult sites, porn, graphic violence, known phishing urls, etc and it will not resolve these sites and throw an error. My kids use their laptops here and now I don't have to worry about them clicking on something bad, etc.

 

Added bonus is that opendns is redundant, and they do have a pay service for schools and corporations, so they are always up. I've never had a dns outage since switching over to opendns a couple of years back during a similar comcast dns issue. If you don't like opendns amazon has public dns servers, and google does as well.

 

opendns:

208.67.222.222

208.67.220.220

 

google:

8.8.8.8

8.8.4.4

[iDnTyX]

Had some of the same issues

Edited December 8, 2010 by iDnTyX