Websites struggling to connect - Is there a fix?
Yeah, it was doing it again yesterday for me. I don't know how to do all this DNS stuff but don't want to mess with it anyway as I don't really know what I'm doing, my mum also has her TV, brother laptop, phone and Xbox etc.. so we'd be having to change DNS on devices all the time which we have no clue about.
Changing DNS's on Smart TV's too could probably be a pain as they navigate pretty slowly. It's been ok today though 
@Mag20 wrote:
It's interesting that this is a widespread issue also - My firewall monitors the PlusNet DNS servers as a basic connectivity test & there is constantly packet loss trying to reach them. There's no wonder lookups are failing for people.
I'd be interested to know exactly how you have that monitoring set up because all of our server monitoring is clean.
I also have my own local monitoring that carries out repeated DNS lookups to both Plusnet's and Google's DNS caches. Again, looks perfectly fine. The better response times are actually from the Plusnet caches (ignore the 0.1% loss, that was a router reboot):-
Regardless, this thread is discussing a failure of the Plusnet Hub to proxy DNS requests. Not failed lookups connecting to the Plusnet DNS servers themselves.
Looking for customers who have a problem where...
- You are using a Plusnet hub One
- DNS requests are failing *across all connected devices*
- DNS requests to the router fail, but direct to Plusnet's servers succeeds. You can establish this by using a Windows command line and running the two commands below. The first will fail but the second will succeed which is indicative of the fault:-
nslookup bbc.co.uk 192.168.1.254nslookup bbc.co.uk 212.159.6.10 - Rebooting the router immediately resolves the issue (until the next time it occurs). It does not recover on its own accord.
- You can manually configure DNS on a particular device (either ours or a third party's) and it will spring back to life.
If *all* of the above are true for anybody, then please shout up and I'll make some preparations so we can grab some diagnostics the next time it happens.
@meldon I've made these changes to your hub so shout the next time it happens and I'll see if we can spot anything from here.
@jlb32 wrote:Otherwise, I've tried these steps and all apply apart from the DNS requests to the router - I've just tried this and both requests fail. Are you able to run any checks at your end?
If they both fail, then the question is whether or not you can connect to the router at all when this happens. When you lose connectivity, can you browse to http://192.168.1.254? If not, it suggests a connectivity issue between the device and router rather than anything DNS related (possibly Wi-Fi).
@ivandamnjanovic wrote:
My connection has exactly the symptoms you have described. I can see that there was no activity on this thread for two weeks -does it means that you have found the solution for this problem?
No, no solution has been found. I'm still looking for somebody who can reliably 'break' things and leave them in a broken state for a while whilst we capture some diagnostics.
@meldon wrote:
nslookup plus.net 192.168.1.254
Server: dsldevice.lan
Address: 192.168.1.254Non-authoritative answer:
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
Name: plus.net
Addresses: 212.159.9.2
212.159.8.2
Again, despite the timeout error, you're getting a response to the DNS request - so this isn't a complete failure and doesn't quite fit the symptoms I've described previously.
Looking at your line, it is erroring quite excessively. The below graph shows the average time (in seconds) between upstream and downstream errors:-
Are you connected directly to your master socket? If not, it might be an idea to remove everything from your phone line, get rid of any extension cabling, connect to the master socket and see if the situation remains. Also no harm in swapping cables/filters out if you have spares.
If these error bursts are causing packets to be dropped then it would explain the partially broken responses from the DNS servers.