[TriLUG] Griping about Time-Warner outage

David Both dboth at millennium-technology.com
Wed Aug 1 09:39:16 EDT 2012


Not everyone will want to go to the lengths that I have to deal with flaky ISP DNS.

I have had trouble with TWC DNS as well as DNS provided by a couple previous 
ISPs I have used. I use an internal caching name server with Google (8.8.8.8 and 
8.8.4.4) as the forwarders. I have not experienced a DNS outage since starting 
that. I have tried OpenDNS as my forwarders, but they do too much filtering of 
"undesirable" IP addresses so I gave up on them. My "undesirable" is not the 
same as theirs. ;-)

I have recently started using my DNS server for internal name resolution instead 
of /etc/hosts files, but that is intended as a learning experience for me. And I 
have learned a lot about DNS that way.


On 08/01/2012 03:32 AM, David Burton wrote:
> This is just "venting" . . .
>
> I just sent the following complaint to time-warner / roadrunner via their
> web form <https://help.rr.com/hmslogic/rrmail.aspx>:
>
> ----------------------------------------
>
> Around 2:50 a.m. today, I lost my Internet connectivity.  I've been waiting
> on hold for tech support for over a half-hour.
>
> While waiting, I investigated further, and it turns out that what happened
> is that BOTH of your nameservers (as provided by your DHCP server) stopped
> responding: 209.18.47.61 and 209.18.47.62.
>
> Other time-warner roadrunner nameservers still work, such as 24.25.5.52 and
> 24.25.4.107, so I've temporarily worked around the problem by setting my
> router to use those nameservers.
>
> But YOU NEED TO FIX THIS!
>
> The whole point of always having TWO nameservers is so that if one goes
> down the other will still be there.  But you're obviously using two
> nameservers at the SAME physical location, which caused them BOTH to go
> down at the same time.
>
> That's a big mistake!
>
> What's more, even after your nameservers had been down for 10 or 15
> minutes, when I refreshed my IP, and even when I power-cycled my
> cablemodem, I got the SAME (non-functioning) nameservers from your DHCP
> server.  Obviously, you SHOULD be monitoring them, and when they go down
> you should adjust the DHCP-provided nameserver info to provide working
> nameservers.
>
> Please let me know when you have fixed these issues!
>
> -- 
>
>
> *********************************************************
> David P. Both, RHCE
> Millennium Technology Consulting LLC
> 919-389-8678
>
> dboth at millennium-technology.com
>
> www.millennium-technology.com
> www.databook.bz - Home of the DataBook for Linux
> DataBook is a Registered Trademark of David Both
>



More information about the TriLUG mailing list