Thanks for checking that out. I don't know for sure, but I think it's highly likely that the times when you can get to the site are the times when your machine is using the OpenDNS nameserver address rather than the Orange nameserver address. It would be interesting to confirm that for sure.

I already did; see my earlier post.

Yes, that is correct, I concur with XRaySpeX.

Edited by deleted (Thu 29-Apr-10 20:15:56)

In reply to a post by Zak_:

Yes, that is correct, I concur with XRaySpeX).

By this, do you mean that you've tried using only Orange's DNS server addresses and consequently found that you couldn't get to our sites?

Yes.

In reply to a post by Zak_:

Yes.

Great, thanks for checking that - with your setup there was a theoretical possibility that Orange's nameservers could have been intermittently providing the right information, but we've proved now that that's not the case. So I still don't know of any Orange customer (and we've heard from dozens and dozens now) who's been able to get to our sites for the last ten days unless they bypassed Orange's broken DNS cache.

So this has now been going on for more than two weeks and all we've got back from Orange are vague responses about how it's 'being investigated' by the 'relevant department'. When I ask what the 'relevant department' is it seems to change every time. There is no indication of what is actually being done or what the timescales for resolution are, and no indication that anyone in Orange has taken responsibility for the problem.

I've never known a technology company that shows such total disinterest in its customers, particularly when the problem is affecting so many of its customers and even more especially when the problem is caused by their own malfunctioning servers. It's truly appalling.

After four weeks I solved this with no help from Orange. As we'd tried everything else, I actually moved our DNS hosting to a different DNS hosting provider. This is a very extreme thing to do, but I hoped that doing something this extreme would finally kick Orange's broken DNS cache servers into updating themselves with the right information. This took a lot of time and cost us money, but thankfully it did have the desired effect. If this hadn't worked then I can only assume that Orange customers would never have been able to access our sites again.

Orange's 'customer service' was consistently appalling, and even weeks after we first told them about the problem they were STILL telling some customers that they didn't know anything about it. As for their technical staff, all that was needed was for them to flush the offending records out of their DNS cache so that the caches would update with the correct new information. This is something I can do on our DNS cache servers in a matter of seconds. I simply cannot understand why, in all that time, they couldn't have done this simple task in order to allow their customers to get to our sites again.

After this shocking experience, I sincerely hope I never have to deal with Orange for anything of this nature - or indeed for any reason at all - ever again.

Edited by bcadmin (Thu 20-May-10 10:43:10)

HI
I've been with orange for years and in late 2007 they moved me to broadband from anytime and I was worried my millennium edition system might not handle it. Anyway as soon as they did this I was unable to access many websites and orange didn't seem able to come up with the answer. For two and a half years I've had access to some websites but not to many such as ebay and argos. I tried pinging websites, emptying internet caches, going into dos and making changes and nothing worked. Suddenly in may this year I was able to access all websites and suddenly it went back to the bad old days of the last two years. I went back to orange but they had no answer and amazingly I stumbled on the answer and it was this.

I went into the control panel
clicked on the network icon
clicked on dial up adapter in the list
clicked on properties
clicked on advanced
clicked on ip packet size
changed value from speedtouch330(that is my modem from orange two years ago)
changed the value to medium
clicked ok
rebooted computer
Now I have access to all websites and I can hardly believe that orange couldn't find that out for me as I contacted them many times over the years.

I hope this helps anyone who is in a similar situation