MTNL ADSL DNS…..

Yeehaw, hows that for showin’ my awesome grasp of technology and TLAs??!! Sorry, just couldn’t resist. That having gotten out of the way, here’s what this posting is all about, which is to check whether you’ve been experiencing any problems with DNS (Domain Name Service) servers when you’re connected to the Net?

I’ve been using the ADSL service from MTNL right since it was started, which must be, errrrrhmmmmmm…. more than 15-months now? Its a reasonable service, connectivity is fairly steady though the speeds don’t exactly cause modem-melt or anything. I have and still do face the patches of complete inactivity, but these are mercifully short and so non-traumatic.

But for about 2-months now, I’d started experiencing a peculiar kind of problem - connectivity was fine, I could ping IP addresses all over, but my web-browser couldn’t connect to any sites….”Firefox is unable to locate the site www.google.com!!”. And this would happen very frequently and annoyingly. The diagnosis was fairly simple, that the domain names were not getting resolved, ergo something wrong with the Domain Name Servers. Till rather recently, I was using a private DNS server that I happened to have access to, but this had been switched off, so I’d moved to the ISP’s DNS servers. This was almost certainly the problem, but what could I do now?

I’d not even imagined that I could set up a personal DNS system on my computer, so when a colleague hinted that this may be possible, it was an aha moment. Which is when I jumped to google. And discovered the TreeWalk DNS. A rather nifty piece of software, pretty tiny, installed quickly and started working right away. One of the ways I could figure it was working was that the home PC on which I’d installed TreeWalk was chugging along fine, but my laptop which was connected to the same router was going nowhere. Voila!

So in case you’ve been experiencing the same kind of problem, i.e. big patches where you’re not able to browse, test whether you’re able to ping an IP address over that connection. If that’s working, then you may want to try TreeWalk.

Ta!