April 08, 2005
Why Comcast Users Cried Last night
Comcast our lovely cable giant seems to have gone under attack last night.
Last night I came home to a deeply dissapointed apartment mate. He was trying the ol resetting the router and resetting the cable modem trick. But this time, it seemed to yield no results.
I figured it was just some routine maintenance so I went out for dinner and figured it would be all better when I came home. After returning a couple hours later and finding that the apartment was still without internet I went into panic mode.
The odd thing was that after a bit of tinkering, I found out google worked perfectly fine, Gaim seemed to be working at about 80%, and my email was working. The funny thing was that I couldn't load Comcast's own web page.
Then slowly over the next hour or so, the internet started to come back to life.
I figured it was a comcast error after asking others on IM if they were having problems with their internet.
So if you're curious to find out exactly why the internet went down for you and why its probably not just "routine maintenance" as Comcast claims, here's some more technical info. Apparently it was due to a DNS poisoning vulnerability in networks with a Windows DNS Server.
If you have problems like this in the future, you can manually work around it by using Verizon or somebody else's DNS servers.
Posted by Bryant at April 8, 2005 02:04 PM
Comments
Stupid Comcast went down again.
Thanks to my friend ravi, I was back up again using alternate DNS:
Start->control panel->Network Connections->Select your network connection
Go to properties
Get properties of the TCP/IP
Click Use the Following DNS Addresses.
I used
DNS 1: 207.69.188.185
DNS 2: 207.69.188.186
Posted by: Bryant at April 12, 2005 09:24 PM