You know how it is, you suffer through a problem for ages, mention it to someone and they say, “oh yeah, I had that, solved it easily”. And so it was with my Time Warner Road runner service. Early this year I started having web browsing problems, often pages would be “not found” and if you hit the refresh button a couple of times, it would work. Funny though as it seemed not to be a connection problem as I could mostly stream the BBC Internet radio without problem.

I added a new wireless router to the existing broadband modem a while back and the problem seemed to go away. Then it was back and I assumed I’d messed a config option but just never had time to fix it. I had guests staying this week and they’ve been frustrated by the lack of reliable service, and since I work in the tech industry, I mentioned it at work yesterday and “oh yeah…”

And so it was this morning I followed the simple instructions for my NetGear broadband modem at https://www.opendns.com/start and so far everything is working perfectly. Without going into a long technical explanation, the DNS server is more or less the white & yellow pages for the Internet. You give it a name in the form of http://austin.metblogs.com and it returns something the computer can actually use in the form of http://1.2.3.4.5 – It appears that problems with Time Warners DNS servers are well known and there have been numerous problems. I didn’t contact TWC to get their view on this, but if you are having this problem you might try the above suggestion, because “I had that problem…”

Now it has to be said that OpenDns isn’t without it’s own controversy, if you type a web site name incorrectly, it redirects you to a search engine that makes suggestions. Not a bad idea but had its own drawbacks.

If you are slightly more tech savy you might want to try http://www.dnsserverlist.org/ and use the suggestions you get from there. Unless you know better…