Billion UK Forum

Starting 9th Sept, been having some truly dire problems with periodic complete loss of Internet service, sometimes for days, and my ISP is now highly involved in trying to pin down the problem. But all looks good to the ISP. All my own tests, including swapping back to a 7800N, confirm that there's a routing issue from my exchange onward. Pings and traceroutes return nothing.

So, I've been wondering whether, all along, I've had the DNS set up properly on the router. I was assured via this forum when I got my 8800N quite some time ago now that I could just configure the DNS into it by using Advanced Setup > DNS, going to "Use the following Static DNS IP address" and entering the primary DNS of my ISP and the 8.8.8.8 Google one as a backup. But was that ALL I needed to do? (Incidentally, I also use fixed IP addresses for the computers/devices on my LAN, so DHCP is turned off and the fixed addresses are well outside the DHCP range).

My setup's worked fine for the last couple of years, so can't think I'm doing anything wrong DNS-wise. And yet the issue seems to revolve around websites not being able to be resolved.

Advice please, as to whether I've configured the 8800 properly in this regard.

gatekeeper wrote:Starting 9th Sept, been having some truly dire problems with periodic complete loss of Internet service, sometimes for days, and my ISP is now highly involved in trying to pin down the problem. But all looks good to the ISP. All my own tests, including swapping back to a 7800N, confirm that there's a routing issue from my exchange onward. Pings and traceroutes return nothing.

So, I've been wondering whether, all along, I've had the DNS set up properly on the router. I was assured via this forum when I got my 8800N quite some time ago now that I could just configure the DNS into it by using Advanced Setup > DNS, going to "Use the following Static DNS IP address" and entering the primary DNS of my ISP and the 8.8.8.8 Google one as a backup. But was that ALL I needed to do? (Incidentally, I also use fixed IP addresses for the computers/devices on my LAN, so DHCP is turned off and the fixed addresses are well outside the DHCP range).

My setup's worked fine for the last couple of years, so can't think I'm doing anything wrong DNS-wise. And yet the issue seems to revolve around websites not being able to be resolved.

Advice please, as to whether I've configured the 8800 properly in this regard.

Your setup sounds fine to me, if you run a trace route/ping to a IP address instead of the domain name (eg ping 8.8.8.8), you can rule out a DNS issue.

When I've lost service completely, pings and traceroutes to the likes of the BBC and Microsoft return absolutely nothing. Under such circumstances I've tried using first just domain names, and then re-run the tests using just IPs. Although they get as far as my local exchange, they then don't get any response from even the first hop, going away from the exchange into the wider Internet, so there's no results at all. Obviously, my browser and e-mail client can then not reach the remote DNS server. The ping or traceroute keeps trying and then eventually times out. Pings from my computers to my router work fine.

Would you agree that this is what you'd expect to happen if, for instance, the first hop's server was misbehaving or was completely down? I now know that the server on the first hop is called the Gateway server, and I suspect it's in a critical path. The Gateway server gets listed in the router's stats.

gatekeeper wrote:When I've lost service completely, pings and traceroutes to the likes of the BBC and Microsoft return absolutely nothing. Under such circumstances I've tried using first just domain names, and then re-run the tests using just IPs. Although they get as far as my local exchange, they then don't get any response from even the first hop, going away from the exchange into the wider Internet, so there's no results at all. Obviously, my browser and e-mail client can then not reach the remote DNS server. The ping or traceroute keeps trying and then eventually times out. Pings from my computers to my router work fine.

Would you agree that this is what you'd expect to happen if, for instance, the first hop's server was misbehaving or was completely down? I now know that the server on the first hop is called the Gateway server, and I suspect it's in a critical path. The Gateway server gets listed in the router's stats.

It does look like a ISP issue if you can't get past your local exchange, the ISP will have to investigate.

Thanks for your view on this.

Yes, I've been trying to get my ISP, a small independent ISP, to fault-find within my exchange and their own network. They've been doing this - albeit by remote access - for some days now, so they claim, but they say that whenever they monitor my connection (irrespective of whether I've a service or not) they can find nothing wrong with it. Personally, I suspect that their remote monitoring mechanism bypasses that Gateway server. In former years, usually in the summer months, service has been lost on the odd occasion for about an hour or so. But this year, the fault has proved catastrophic. The ISP, like all ISPs except BT and Virgin, is reluctant to get an Openreach techie to investigate at the exchange or beyond, because they'll have to pay for it.

After 3 days of zero service (as seen from my end), my only recourse was to use my neighbour's computer to communicate with the ISP's support team, my neighbour being on the same exchange but with a different ISP to mine. This concentrated some minds.

Since late yesterday afternoon, the service has been back and up and running again. However, the ISP won't say whether they've found a problem or not. Probably not, which means that I could lose service again at some random time.