Monday, August 06, 2007

Maxis broadband "disconnected"

While browsing web in my office as a Maxis broadband service subscriber (fyi, Sri Hartamas is a Maxis territory), once in a while we may get "The page cannot be displayed." error. From there on, all WWW is no longer accessible and the common solution for this is to restart and router. But what happened if u need to restart every 30 mins or less? That is simply too much a effort.

A quick ping testing indeed explains everything. As for my analysis, i took www.yahoo.com as example. This is done before get "disconnected".
ping www.yahoo.com
Pinging www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net [87.248.113.14] with 32 bytes of data:

From the pinging output, we can derives that domain name is actually translated to the following IP via DNS server.
www.yahoo.com=
87.248.113.14

In order to determine the DNS server is the real culprit, i did a separate ping on the domain name and the translated IP when the error page returned.
ping www.yahoo.com - Negative result
ping
87.248.113.14 - Positive result

As a result, it clearly shows the internet connection is up but the DNS server failed to translate the domain name to the corresponding IP. In other words, you can still access to yahoo web site if you hit the site IP directly. Eg, http://
87.248.113.14

According to Maxis, all the broadband user DNS settings should be set as automatically. The problem is sometimes the DNS settings might lost in the space and hence "disconnecting" the user. In fact, this also affects Streamyx subscriber frequently. Thank to Google, i managed to find a Maxis DNS IP that revitalize my browser. Apparently this DNS settings is meant for the GPRS service, but as long as it works:D

These are the one and only Maxis DNS server found in the net:
Primary DNS: 202.75.129.101
Alternate DNS: 202.75.129.102

Alternatively, should you run out of idea what DNS IP to use, you can always opt for the public DNS server. Check it out at http://www.opendns.com/

Hope this could help some of the desperate Maxis broadband subcriber out there;)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Most of the time, borked DNS servers can be "felt". Serious!

If your browser spends a long time looking up host names (you can know that by looking at the status bars of standard web browsers), you know the DNS servers are probably choked.

When the "DNS server" field is set to automatic, your computer will use whatever dodgy DNS server pushed by your DHCP server. If those DNS servers are borked, you can configure your box to ignore the settings by manually specifying which name servers to use.

In some cases, it might help performance if the local network has a caching DNS proxy.

Unfortunately, my work place does not have that. All I can do is to increase the number of domain names cached by my web browser. I use FireFox. I only use Internet Exploiter when I need to debug crappy web UI bugs. Might I add, most of the time, it is the deviation of standards by IE that's causing the bugs.

So how did I increase the DNS cache size?

# Type "about:config" in the address bar
# Create an entry named network.dnsCacheEntries
# Give it an unimaginable large value. I have it set to 128.

Cheers!

Popo said...

thanks man im having this problem now but you helped me fix it. cheers!

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