Oops! Baby in left hand, mouse in right, non-functioning computer in front. What's the problem? Skype's online, but no email access (LAN-based server) or Web (WAN). Hmmm, must be a DNS problem.
Dig, dig, dig. Check config. Aha! Here it is.
I've got the old fixed DNS settings for my home PC, not the new ones. My ISP, Zen, mailed me many moons ago to say they were changing. I updated my laptop, but not my desktop. I guess I'm not the only one who got caught out, as it's right there on the front of their support pages:
DNS Server - 212.23.8.1 retired
The retirement of the DNS server 212.23.8.1 for recursive lookups has been completed today, at 1pm.
Any customers still using this DNS server should immediately update their DNS server address settings to be picked up automatically, or to use the following:
212.23.3.100 and
212.23.6.100
So, what's the point? Well, Zen is a "premium" ISP. You don't get to wait in a queue for support. They give you static IPs, allow servers, whoop for joy when you launch a VPN and offer to babysit for you on a weekly basis. Now, they must have known lots of customers were still hammering the old DNS server. Yes, they told you so. But still, how much effort would it have been to grab the logs, extract the IP addresses of those doing lookups, do a quick upload into their customer RDBMS, and issue a query that would create a script to email all the customers still with the old settings?
If you're going to differentiate yourself on customer service, why not make it a "wow!" experience?
(PS - Any geeks wondering why I'm not using DHCP to pick up the settings automatically, it's because my DSL router is crap and seems to screw up too often so I lost patience and cut it out of the loop.)
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:56 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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