DNS woes

So, anyone else having the fubar DNS issues?

On the plus side, I learned how to manual set the DNS on an Apple TV 3.

Me too. Just spent 50 minutes in phone queque to BT. They said, 30 minutes ago, they were notified of a widespread DNS failure. It is now with BT Wholesale.

The DNS server settings on my HH3 are not confifurable so have had to go round to each device setting the DNS server to Open DNS (208.67.222.222).

I didn't just have DNS issues here. Sure that was the longer running issue (which remains) but during the 7-9pm period I had periods of
- total packet loss
- very high latency (300+ ms)
reboot/reconnect made no difference (VDSL was rock solid on external HG612 for 50 days)

The DNS issue remains however and disappointingly no information on status page, nothing from @btcare on twitter, nothing in forum.

if only I had a non BT router I could easily have changed upstream DNS. Frustrating to have to manually configure machines, especially laptop/mobiles that go onto other wifi/ethernet networks.

No issues here and I have one of the standard BT DNS pairs in my router - editable but I have no need to change it.

I guess it's only affecting some locations then....

But seems to be many locations across the country. See http://downdetector.co.uk/problems/bt-british-telecom.
The Daily Express have the story too.
I'm on the Yateley exchange (01252).

I lost access around 16:30 and rebooted my HH3 with no effect. So then powered cycled the fibre box and HH3 and this time eventually (or maybe just coincidence) got working again. Fortunately just in time for my BT Youview box to record the cricket highlights.

We may have seen a 5-10% drop in BT customers running tests during last night, but nothing to the scale of the previous major outages.

Heat maps can be useful, but not sure it gives the granularity needed

Yes, from Downdetector it seemed to be southern England from MK-ish down, with the south west particularly clobbered.

It was tiresome having to reset device-by-device, but at least I was able to help a couple of people on downdetector.

London also had some power outage yesterday around dinner time, this might of also contributed to the issues, but I might be wrong.

Paul

Similar issue tonight. Dead DNS. Just configured my raspberrypi as DHCP server instead of the HH5a so at least it could dole out a decent DNS server to the far-too-many client devices I have. There's been glitches in the past. one too many and relatively easy to work around. Far easier than manual reconfig (a local caching DNS is a step for another night)

Performance is degraded this evening though on throughput - down to 10-17 Mbps from the typical stable 32 Mbps. VDSL sync is fine, error free, solid at 35 Mbps for 50 days so pretty sure this is BT congestion.

I'm surprised this has gone over 24 hours.

| Update.. speed normal now. none of the usual laptops/PCs were doing data rx/tx but perhaps one of the far-too-many systems was...... will give them benefit of doubt and hope issue is restricted to DNS.

Edited by planetf1 (Wed 04-Jan-17 22:21:47)

Looks "ok" here http://tbb.st/1483568980248708255

A local DNS Cache won't help unless you configure it to ignore the TTL values of results returned from authoritative servers - which isn't a recommended action. Where it will help is reducing lookup times (mine is currently <8mS) and giving the ability to 'black hole' domains - such as advertising, tracking and malicious etc.