Here is the problem: For no apparent reason, your broadband Internet connection ceases to work. All your modem lights glow normally. You plug and unplug your modem a million times hoping that it might work with a reboot. Then you check your telephone line, anticipating that your phone line might be dead. Finally you call up the customer care. What happens on the phone is a story in itself - If you are lucky enough to call at a time when their queue is not "full", you are put on a waiting, generally for a few minutes. Then you are greeted with the usual sarkari voice... You explain the problem and the agent invariably asks you to restart your modem. If that does not work, you are asked to login to your router's control panel as he painfully confirms whether all your settings are correct. If they are, they issue you a complaint number and assure you that someone from MTNL would contact you shortly and look into the problem. When they will actually turn up is left to God's grace. The culprit: Assuming that you really did not mess up your modem's internal settings or your computer's network settings, the culprit is most likely to be MTNL's DNS server. DNS (domain name server) converts human friendly names like "www.yahoo.com" and "www.google.com" to IP addresses, which machines use to recognize each other on a computer network. If the DNS server is down, your domain name requests (which is sent after hitting Enter after filling up a URL on the browser's address bar) won't get converted to the correct IP address and hence you will not be able to "reach" that website. Damn! The solution: Your choice of DNS is not restricted to using MTNL's own DNS. I recently found a free for all DNS server at www.opendns.com. (If you want to know how to change your DNS server settings, I suggest you do a simple Google search.) Before changing to their DNS servers, I suggest you note down your original settings somewhere, just in case you want to revert. I have been using Open DNS for quite a while, and I have not experience any Internet downtime so far. So it's definitely worth changing to. Moreover, I feel reassured that in case Open DNS goes down, I can revert to MTNL's own DNS and start surfing! (Hopefully, both shouldn't be down at the same time).
thanx man! good post, My mtnl connection was down and acting the same way ... i found this and this save the day.. this works!! cool man great solution
these are the openDNS servers...me using them for both of my isp's for a long time now.. 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220