What does this mean ?

I lost connection to the internet for 20 mins yesterday and the asus router shown the following

nameserver ********** refused to do a recursive query
nameserver ********** refused to do a recursive query

* replaces numbers

My isp is not sure what this error means, and they say there was no known faults in my area at the time i lost connection. Anyone here have any idea ?

Is my router borked ?

We are with IDNet as well and had an outage from about 20:00 until 21:15. Router was still connected and showing the usual sync speed but no internet access. Looking at the router GUI, my IPV4 WAN gateway address was not my static IDNet address and my IPV6 WAN gateway address was blank. When we were reconnected I started seeing sensible gateway IP addresses again.

IDNet support could only say that they thought it was a network problem as their kit was not having any issues and they were getting a number of reports from our general area (Northumberland) about an outage.

Our router was also connected but without internet access, after about 20 mins ours came back online and idnet said it could have been unplanned works.

The router errors i have not seen before and wondered what they mean ?

Hi

If there is no internet connection then things of course fail.

When you request a web page, the first thing that has to be done is convert the address like www.thinkbroadband.com to a number (IP address), this process uses name servers. If there is no Internet this look up fails, hence the log entry made.

Sometimes it might only be the name servers that have gone down, but the rest of the Internet is alive, this often results in some things still working as your computer already knows the IP address from a previous lookup, but pages you haven't visited in a while show an error because the name can't be looked up. You can change your name servers if your ISPs servers are not very reliable. See https://whatismyipaddress.com/switch-dns

Regards

Phil

Hi,

It sounds like IDNet's DNS Servers aren't working. You should give them a call & ask them to reboot their DNS server(s). That might fix the issue that you're having. Another solution would be to use Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4).

HTH,

is it best to connect to your isp dns or google ?

Hi,

If your ISP's DNS isn't working then you have no choice.....

HTH,

Well its working again for now, i will see how things go

In reply to a post by mking90031:

If your ISP's DNS isn't working then you have no choice.....

Of course if this is a wholesale outage of the PPP between the end user modem and the ISP termination, then it will LOOK as if its a DNS failure, but that's just a misleading error message.

Given other posters report that there was an unexplained regional outage, implies something went wrong in the wholesale network connecting the user to the ISP. Whichever wholesale (often called "tail") network is used by the ISP in question. The biggest being BT wholesale.

In reply to a post by wowitsme:

is it best to connect to your isp dns or google ?

In general I would say neither. I personally use 1.1.1.1 and 9.9.9.9.