I’ve been having major issues with what I thought was a downstream server and I unrightfully blamed Comcast for the issue. An incorrect DNS redirection was taking place sporadically for any machine connected to the network. It didn’t matter if I was using Comcast’s DNS, Google Public DNS, OpenDNS, or anything. Â I would constantly see my tweets not go through and then refresh the page to get a dead blogspot page where other people had commented about how they wanted to get to twitter. Â I had the same experience on Facebook redirecting to Myspace, Google getting redirected to WikiMedia, and a whole assortment of other sites being redirected an invalid Akamai page.
I talked to many smart people about this and did a number of searches for the issue. The solution started to become more clear when a visitor to my Youtube video with the twitter going to blogspot issue commented on the video saying that he had the same router as me (WRT160N) and that he had fixed it by changing his machine’s IP address on the router when it happened.
That solved the problem each time I was dealing with it, but it kept occurring. Tonight I got some redemption. I wasn’t crazy. There’s a whole thread on the linksys forums regarding this issue. Some of the advice on there directed me to host my own DNS server locations on my own machine.
I have solved it by doing the following:
Setting up my connection to my router to be a manually provided IP address, subnet mask, and Gateway, and inputting the DNS entries for Google’s Public DNS for that entry. Â Make sure you provide three DNS entries though (I use OpenDNS’s for my third). Â If you don’t provide 3 DNS servers the third one will default to the router and you could see the problem again.
The bad part about all of this is that you’ll need to do this for each machine that gets connected to the wireless network. Â Game systems don’t seem to be affected since they use IP based calls when going online, however you might have issues with Twitter/Facebook on XBOX Live during one of these outages unless you have setup a manual IP address for your XBOX as well (which is suggested since you’ll need to do some port forwarding if connected wirelessly).
I’ll add some screenshots and OS specific how-tos later, but I wanted to get this out.
