[Nottingham] BT

[James Beckett]

On Thu, 2004-01-22 at 22:33, David Ginger wrote:
> I have found that BT is playing games. BT is reguarly not 
> letting me get to Google. This has been happening on and off 
> for a few days now.
> 
> Any thoughts ?

Is it the actual connection to google that's failing, or just
the DNS lookup?

To check the connection, try using
 http://216.239.39.99/
 http://216.239.57.99/
 http://216.239.37.99/
in your browser. If that gets through when http://www.google.com/
doesn't, you probably have DNS problems.

To check your DNS connectivity, try the following tests using the
"host" command from bind-utils (or 'dig' or 'nslookup')

 me$ host google.com
 google.com has address 216.239.39.99
 google.com has address 216.239.57.99
 google.com has address 216.239.37.99

 me$ host ns.google.com
 ns.google.com has address 216.239.32.10

 me$ host ns1.google.com
 ns1.google.com has address 216.239.32.10

 me$ host ns2.google.com
 ns2.google.com has address 216.239.34.10

 me$ host ns3.google.com
 ns3.google.com has address 216.239.36.10

 me$ host ns4.google.com
 ns4.google.com has address 216.239.38.10

If these don't work, then your DNS requests are getting lost somewhere.
Try sending one direct to a master server:

 me$ host google.com 216.239.32.10
 Using domain server:
 Name: 216.239.32.10
 Address: 216.239.32.10#53
 Aliases:
 
 google.com has address 216.239.57.99
 google.com has address 216.239.39.99
 google.com has address 216.239.37.99

Let us know how you get on with these (at a time when your connection
to google isn't working!) and we'll probably have more things to try...

I've had problems with BT's nameservers before, where the connection
itself is actually fine. These can sometimes be worked around by having
your own caching nameserver set up.

cheers,
James
-- 
James Beckett <jmb at hackery.net>
<www.hackery.net/jmb/>