kaioa.com

A series of tubes (or not)

I'm using this network stuff for about a decade by now. I always just filled the required values in and never thought about it much. Well, until yesterday that is. It began with something simple; I wanted to read something over at one of Sun's sub domains.

"Address Not Found", Firefox complained. I briefly looked outside the window to confirm that it doesn't rain frogs or something. Alright, it's Just one of those random DNS issues.

It's just a temporary problem, but it didn't really feel like waiting this time. One forehead slap later I grabbed some DNS server IP, added it to my TCP/IP configuration, and everything was sorted.

With Windows XP this dialog can be found via: Start → Control Panel → Network and Internet Connections → Local Area Connection → Properties → Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) → Properties. With the classic menu it's a bit shorter and you most likely already know where to find it, therefore I'll skip that part.

Since Windows 95 that dialog looks more or less the same:

Figure 1: XP's TCP/IP dialog with the most unimaginative values

In this case the default gateway and the preferred DNS server use the same IP — the IP from the router. If your router can handle DNS requests it's a good idea to use it. The alternate DNS server entry is the thing I'm talking about. I added 204.152.184.76 (f.6to4-servers.net) there. It's one (currently) uncensored US DNS server.

You can also add even more DNS server via that "Advanced" button in the lower right, but two servers are usually enough to go from a few failed look-ups per months to virtually none.