seems to be back to normal now.
using roger's dns servers and have not had any errors at all yesterday or today. sososopro

This appears to be back with a vengeance today

I was suffering. Had to use server IP address to get here. Use the Verizon IP address for DNS and everything is fine.

Has Rogers screwed up again?

Yep, problems here too. It looked like a massive meltdown of the Rogers DNS as it started with some sites being unresolvable and it gradually moved to no sites at all being resolvable.

Thankfully, I saved a documents with lots of alternative DNS IPs so I got back on with little problems.

too bad this thread doesn't help if you're a roger's customer and your dns is out. (....argh)

Luckly I remembered the same thing happening in November... .VOIP works, but only one-third of the websites IE or Firefox or Thunderbird..


Today none of the 5 sites i tried, including DHC worked, so I called my helpful IT department at work and got them to give me a couple DNS addresses over the phone.

Now to write them down at home!

P

I'm a bit surprised that Rogers relies on only one DNS server. You'd think they would have a backup as TCP/IP allows for that just for cases like these. And having a backup DNS server is not rocket science...

The only thing that saved me was I new the IP address of Digital Home and typed the IP address in directly. That allowed me to find the Verizon IP address and update my router!

I'm going to document here at home!

I noticed this problem today shortly after 1pm also. My Vonage was working, no websites.
I tried resetting my modem a couple times, but when that didn't work I remembered that I'd saved the OpenDNS server addresses and tried those - worked right away.

It's time for Rogers to consider a 2nd DNS server.

Here's OpenDNS's servers for anyone who'd like to try them. (I won't speculate on their business model...)
208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

I'm a bit surprised that Rogers relies on only one DNS server. You'd think they would have a backup as TCP/IP allows for that just for cases like these. And having a backup DNS server is not rocket science...
Although Rogers shows one IP address for their DNS server, it does not necessarily mean they only have one DNS server. You can use round robin routing where the requests to this IP address get routed to different machines. It is easy to do and is done quite often to load balance services under high demand while only using one public IP address.
The advantage is by only have one IP address it becomes much less of a configuration chore. If you need more capacity for the service, you simple another server into the mix. The other advantage of this is if one of the servers fails, the other boxes can continue to handle the requests, albeit at a higher than ideal load level.
This type of setup is very, very common.

FYI, I have had no problems with Rogers DNS in the Toronto area whatsoever.

The other advantage of this is if one of the servers fails

I find it very ironic that you say that considering the topic. Something isn't working somewhere...

However, I want a backup DNS at my end so when one fails to respond, my machine will go to the other. Clearly, we needed that last week.

Based on the comments that it was working sporadically for some people, it actually confirms to me they are using a round-robin-routing system. Some DNS requests were being forwarded to a machine that was still working, while others were being routed to a dead/overwhelmed machine. The system failed either because of:
1) The round-robin setup was not detecting a dead machine and continued to route requests to a dead machine.
2) More likely, some machine(s) failed, and the remaining machines were unable to handle to increased load placed on them, causing timeouts and crashes. In other words, they did not have enough spare DNS server capacity in place to handle some hardware failure gracefully.

I agree having a backup DNS server for you to access is a great idea. But you really need to rely on a DNS server that is NOT from your ISP.

I use Rogers Cable for Internet. Since 2 to 3 months ago, I started having intermittent problem with web browsing:

I type in a URL (e.g. www.google.com) and hit return, my browser says "Looking up www.google.com" for a long time. Sometimes it will time out.

This does not happen all the time, only sometimes. Looking up a domain suggests to me the DNS is not responding, which I think would be a Rogers problem. If the slow down was at the stage that says "Waiting for www.google.com to respond", then I think it's a google problem. But that doesn't happen to me. At least not often.

I called Rogers. They said their DNS doesn't have any problem. If it did, they would hear from many users (which I don't really agree since not many people even know what DNS is). Rogers think it may be a problem with my router. They asked me to remove the router for a few days and see if the problem still exists. It's very impractical for me to do so and I haven't tried that.

I just wonder if others have similar experience, with slow down at "looking up [domain name]".

A better test may be to use a command prompt window to enter

>ping www.google.ca

You should notice that the first response is a line that includes the IP address of the google server. In my case this is immediate. If it is not immediate (and you don't suspect other network issues), then I would agree, DNS is suspect.

My router currently has 64.71.255.198 listed as the Rogers DNS server and you may want to confirm your router's config.

See Rogers DNS lookup problems (http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=54669)

This has been ongoing for a long time. See what members have done to alleviate the problems in that thread

Thanks much!

It's sad that Rogers wouldn't acknowledge this problem as theirs when many people here completely resolved the issue by switching from their Rogers DNS to a third party DNS.

It's also unfortunate that 90%+ of Rogers customers doesn't know that Rogers cause this slow down or total timeout, and just simply blame general internet congestion or the website's server outage as the cause.

Hi,

Is anyone else on rogers able to resolve www.costco.ca? My connection keeps timeing out. I tried changing my DNS servers to opendns to no avail. If I VPN to Securiex there are no problems.


Tracert looks like this.

Tracing route to www.costco.ca [170.167.8.7]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.2.1
2 8 ms 7 ms 7 ms 10.117.84.1
3 6 ms 7 ms 9 ms 66.185.90.209
4 8 ms 7 ms 7 ms 24.153.4.233
5 8 ms 9 ms 9 ms gw02.mtnk.phub.net.cable.rogers.com [66.185.81.94]
6 9 ms 9 ms 10 ms gw02.ym.phub.net.cable.rogers.com [66.185.80.186]
7 48 ms 60 ms 51 ms pos-3-.igw01.chfdrl.phub.net.cable.rogers.com [66.185.81.1]
8 35 ms 34 ms 34 ms so-4-1.ar5.CHI1.gblx.net [64.210.69.205]
9 99 ms 100 ms 99 ms InterNAP-Ken-Schmid.ge-3-0-0.402.ar2.SEA1.gblx.net [208.49.181.130]
10 100 ms 98 ms 100 ms border7s.ge3-0.bbnet2.sea.pnap.net [206.253.192.220]
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.

merged this because it's likely part of ongoing issues with Rogers DNS

I am still not able to reach http://www.costco.ca/. I have been unable to for a week. I have switched to Verizon DNS but to no avail. Also tried OpenDNS's servers Can't reach http://www.rbua.org/ either (Residential Broadband Users' Association)??? Any suggestions?

andya, fyi i am able to reach the two sites you mentioned. i am in toronto, on rogers, using opendns, running firefox on mac. it's possible that your problem was not dns? regards

andya, fyi i am able to reach the two sites you mentioned. i am in toronto, on rogers, using opendns, running firefox on mac. it's possible that your problem was not dns? regards
I tried with Firefox. No luck But I am using a PC with XP. and I am in Unionville.

To check the health of DNS queries, open a DOS window (run cmd.exe) and type nslookup www.costco.ca