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FTTC: BT Wholesale's Green screen of death

WWWombat
Grafter
Posts: 1,412
Thanks: 4
Registered: ‎29-01-2009

FTTC: BT Wholesale's Green screen of death

Hi all; long time since I popped in!
We have an FTTC connection that works well in all respects, except for one: We get the "BT Wholesale Green screen of death" when browsing onto a new website - the one that reports that:

Quote
You have been connected to this page due to one of the following reasons. You must now shut down your browser and Internet applications before attempting to reconnect.
The BTWholesale access circuit to your Service Provider is currently down.
Your service should be resumed soon.
Or
You are testing your local connection to BT using
'bt_test_user@startup_domain'
Or
You are testing your connection to your Service Provider using 'bt_test_user@domain' where domain is your Service Provider domain name.
Or
Your Service Provider is currently unable to accept your connection request please wait until service is restored or contact your Service Provider for further information.
Or
You have attempted to access an invalid Service Provider domain.

We get these at irregular occasions (perhaps once every one or two weeks), and usually have to get the router to disconnect & reconnect to fix things - but this isn't always enough. Sometimes it takes 4 or 5 re-connects to work... and sometimes I just give up.
An interesting thing to note is that this appears to be a problem with DNS only - browsing a site where the DNS name has been cached will continue to work - so new pages come up OK, and videos can be watched.
Searches on the forum suggest that a fix is to hard-code Plusnet's DNS servers into the router. However, I have a different setup (a caching name-server running on a Linux box) that already does this: It ignores the information in the router, and goes direct to either 212.159.6.9 or 212.159.6.10 for addresses that are not in the cache. I also restart this name-server whenever I re-connect the router, just to make sure I dislodge the fake BT address.
This is happening often enough now to be a little frustrating, with a particularly annoying episode yesterday lunchtime. Does anyone have any other clues, or things to try?
Plusnet Customer
Using FTTC since 2011. Currently on 80/20 Unlimited Fibre Extra.
4 REPLIES 4
jojopillo
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Posts: 9,786
Registered: ‎16-06-2010

Re: FTTC: BT Wholesale's Green screen of death

Hi WWWombat,
Quote from: WWWombat
Searches on the forum suggest that a fix is to hard-code Plusnet's DNS servers into the router. However, I have a different setup (a caching name-server running on a Linux box) that already does this: It ignores the information in the router, and goes direct to either 212.159.6.9 or 212.159.6.10 for addresses that are not in the cache.

I've only seen this because of the DNS settings in the router. Is it not worth setting these anyway just in case there are times when it refers to them?
Jojo Smiley
WWWombat
Grafter
Posts: 1,412
Thanks: 4
Registered: ‎29-01-2009

Re: FTTC: BT Wholesale's Green screen of death

Hi Jojo,
You're right - it probably is worth doing the change anyway...I've set it to "Use These DNS Servers" instead of "Get Automatically from ISP"; it had the correct two addresses already.
We'll see if anything happens over the next few weeks...
Mike
Plusnet Customer
Using FTTC since 2011. Currently on 80/20 Unlimited Fibre Extra.
jojopillo
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Posts: 9,786
Registered: ‎16-06-2010

Re: FTTC: BT Wholesale's Green screen of death

Bit of a shot in the dark to be honest, Mike, but always worth a try. Let us know if you get any more issues with it.
Jojo Smiley
WWWombat
Grafter
Posts: 1,412
Thanks: 4
Registered: ‎29-01-2009

Re: FTTC: BT Wholesale's Green screen of death

Hi Jojo,
I thought I'd send an update here....
It looks like the change to the router's DNS servers has indeed fixed things.... I've seen none of the dreaded green-warning-screens in the 4 weeks since I made the change, whereas I was getting almost daily occurrences beforehand.
I've no idea *why* it worked, as the computers were set to never query DNS through the router, but it does seem to have had an effect.
  Mike
Plusnet Customer
Using FTTC since 2011. Currently on 80/20 Unlimited Fibre Extra.