Recently I’ve experienced much downtime with my ISP, Comcast. I was able to narrow it down to their DNS servers, because their gateway was reachable. The DNS servers, on the other hand, were completely off the map. All ping requests timed out. After fiddling with router settings and renewing our IP address, I got the DHCP server to assign me new DNS servers which are working (at least for now).
This isn’t the first time this has happened. Over the past few weeks, I’ve experienced this problem several times. Last week my dad called Comcast and found that they were aware of this problem and that they were “working on it.”
When the servers went down again today, I just had to find out what was really going on. I googled for “comcast dns outage”–the situation was just as I had suspected. Why Comcast is chasing DNS outages | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com reveals that Comcast’s DNS architecture just isn’t enough to handle DDoS attacks.
Because they’ve got no management tools and little or no failover, when they get hit, they can’t respond effectively. They’re essentially fighting a five alarm fire with a bucket brigade. As a consequence, they have had multiple, multi-million customer, multi-hour outages.
Hopefully they’ll get this problem fixed soon, because you really can’t do that much on the computer without Internet access. :-D
Why Comcast is chasing DNS outages by ZDNet‘s Phil Windley — If you’re not a Comcast customer, you’re probably blissfully unaware of the problems that Comcast customers have been experiencing the last few weeks. If you are a Comcast customer, then like me, you’ve likely experienced serious downtime and you’re probably wondering what’s going on. I’ve heard a few things through the grapevine and what I’ve [...]