DNS Issues

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

So almost every day for the past month Telkom's DNS has been utter rubbish. Sites stop loading or never load whereas others work perfectly and it's almost like being offline whilst being online. I have an account with Incredible Connect from a promotion they were doing where they were giving away 6 months account with new laptop purchases and that then always works perfectly when I switch over.

So now I finally decided to try a different public DNS but international ones have a problem where for some sites it now takes even longer for the routing to run it's course which I quickly found out with Google's Public DNS so that's a no go even though it is much better than what Telkom's DNS manages.

So I'm kind of hoping one of you might know of any local or at least closer to home DNS's could try.

Currently using DNS Avantage which is still International but seems to be the best compromise at the moment.
(http://dnsadvantage.com/)
But I'd really like a local one till Telkom get their act together so I'd greatly appreciate any help you can give me.

 

[grim]

Try OpenDNS 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

 

[cpu.]

Google's DNS working very fast for me on Telkom.

 

[twhitehead]

Sites stop loading or never load whereas others work perfectly and it's almost like being offline whilst being online.

Why do you think it is DNS? If a site stops loading that is probably not a DNS issue. If DNS fails, the browser should tell you specifically that it is a DNS issue (I know Chrome does, I am not sure about others).

 

[lilggg]

Yup i'm so sick of this happening. Steam doesnt work unless i use the dsl cache proxy, imgur doesnt work, nasa.gov doesnt work and many others don't work. Sure using the proxy is a solution but sick of having to change between proxy and no proxy because some things dont work with the proxy either.

dsl-cache.saix.net: 8080 that should at least get the sites loading but this shouldn't be needed, so over telkom ffs.

 

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

Why do you think it is DNS? If a site stops loading that is probably not a DNS issue. If DNS fails, the browser should tell you specifically that it is a DNS issue (I know Chrome does, I am not sure about others).

Because the line and sites are fine. I know that because of the Incredible Connect account which works perfectly on the same line whenever Telkom decides half the internet doesn't exist. And also because manually setting a DNS tends to sort out the Telkom line whenever there are issues. And the smartphone also has no issues on 3G data either.
And it's not some sort of intermittent disconnect because downloads from the sites that work flawlessly don't get interrupted the whole time.
And I also tested some of the pages on all 3 of my browsers so it wasn't that (allthough FF set to manual cache management retained the behaviour during the few times Telkom returned to normal operation).
DNS is basically the only thing left.

Browsers don't show a gateway error message or other error messages once they've loaded even 1% of the site. If it then gets stuck the only way you'll know is when your coffee gets cold and it still hasn't budged, or if you're used to that sort of behaviour.

So it has to be DNS, I didn't just randomly decide this. Heck I even bought a new router before exploring the DNS angle (not a total waste though since the old one had developed some annoyances and wasn't in it's prime anymore).

 

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

Try OpenDNS 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

Thanks will do. But isn't that still international?

Google's DNS working very fast for me on Telkom.

Worked ok for me to at first but then I noticed that some sites loaded slower than on Incredible Connect or Telkom when it worked.

This site even failed to load most of the time.
http://www.supercheats.com/guides/assassins-creed-ii/venice-feather-locations
(or was it this one? can't remember now http://www.ign.com/wikis/assassins-creed-2/Venice)

Researched changing DNS a bit more and found something about some sites serving content through something called a content delivery node (CDN) which tended to create lag if the DNS was very far away from you similar to connecting to a faraway international server for an online game.

So I decided to try DNS Advantage and that has served me best up to this point but still not quite as good as Telkom when their dynamically assigned DNS actually works or when using Incredible Connect so I still think that if there's a local alternative I can try that that might be better.

Yup i'm so sick of this happening. Steam doesnt work unless i use the dsl cache proxy, imgur doesnt work, nasa.gov doesnt work and many others don't work. Sure using the proxy is a solution but sick of having to change between proxy and no proxy because some things dont work with the proxy either.

dsl-cache.saix.net: 8080 that should at least get the sites loading but this shouldn't be needed, so over telkom ffs.

Yeah Steam was a big one. I think out of all the days last month there were only 2 where all the elements on the Steam site loaded with no issues (3 or 4 more where the site mostly worked). At that point it's almost worse than having no internet at all because whenever it starts feeling like that it reminds you that you still do but you can't have any of it.

Was also having issues with Facebook and my dad could never get Google Maps to fully load. Other sites would work and not work at random with not discretion being given for local sites which struggled just as much as the international ones.

It's gotten to the point where having a second account with a completely different ISP is just about a necessity.

 

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

Sorry for the tripple-post but just one more thing.
A warning basically if you have similar issues and want to use an International DNS like I and some others did. Your local only cap if you have one won't work rather obviously (since you have no international connectivity but are try to query sites internationally) on the international DNS so once you've been caped set it back to the automatically assigned DNS to access the local cap. That surprised me at first when I suddenly found the net was plain dead after I'd been capped on Friday. So just keep that in mind.

 

[lilggg]

I just switched to google dns but like u said some things take long to load cos of the routing or whatever. But still better than it was.

 

[DominionZA]

I had an odd discovery the other day.

I have been having what I thought to be DNS issues for a while. I was constantly getting page load errors and they resembled DNS issues completely. When it happened I would F5 the page repeatedly and suddenly it would load and things would be fine for a while. Then bang, failures start again.

When googling for a solution I saw a post where someone mentioned their firewall was blocking connections when reaching a certain amount.
I am using Kerio Connect. I checked out my connection limit and it was set to 600 max per device. This looked like more than enough, but I changed it to unlimited anyway.
Problem resolved. No more failures. Been about a week now and not a single failure - where I was getting multiple failures a day.

Just something else to possibly look out for.

 

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

no it's definitely not that either since it worked perfectly before
and I also don't have any extra firewall other than stock Windows

but thanks anyways