Grover Ponders

Late last week I got a message from Doug with the Avro Museum project (who I'm on the board of directors for). He was telling me that the Avro Museum website was down, and he could not receive any emails from our server. Seeing as I'm the guy responsible for that server, I promptly took a look and could confirm the server seemed to be working just fine.

So, diagnostics come into play now, and if I could access the server from my network, but Doug could not from his, then the problem had to be on their network some how. After spending some time trying to diagnose this over the phone I ended up visiting today.

The odd thing was that one of the boxes on the network could get the website just fine, but the 2 other workstations could not resolve the www.avromuseum.ca domain name. So the base networked seemed to be fine, but the two workstations were not. The real kicker is that these two workstations could access EVERY other website just fine.

Well, after some time troubleshooting today, I determined that the DNS server assigned to their Linksys firewall was the culprit. What triggered this for me is that they were originally set up to point to their local firewall for their name resolution - as they should be. But when I determined what server the firewall was using for DNS and applied that directly on the workstation, things still failed. So I next ran nslookup to see what it could tell me. It promptly told me that the Shaw server in question could not resolve the name.

This is SHAW - the cable company. The people who do the Internet professionally for many many people. And one of their servers could not resolve an IP address that has not changed in over a year, when there have been NO changes to the DNS configuration for that domain.

What helped me determine that Shaw was at fault was one of Jon Watson's blog postings from Sunday where he also lamented over problems with Shaw's DNS servers. I monitor Jon's blog simply because we both seem to have similar interests, and am happy that I'm not the only guy who can rant... :)

So sometime in the past week, Shaw made a change to their DNS servers, and are well known to not update their DNS records in a timely fashion (but the rest of the world can do it - the DNS servers do this by DEFAULT). So the solution is to simply remove Shaw's DNS servers from the network setup.

I switched firewall to use the OpenDNS servers. Suddenly the workstations could resolve the domain name properly.

But wait, Shaw was not done with me yet.

One of the two workstations worked flawlessly after this change. The other could resolve the name, but refused to open the web page. It turns out that this workstation was set up to dynamically get proxy server information if available and use a proxy. So it ended up using Shaw's proxy server, which seems to also hate that domain name. This was simple to fix, though I would have floundered for quite some time if Gustin hadn't seen this type of problem before. Gustin is a friend of mine who does network engineering and support, and one of my backup tech support guys when I get stumped. (he calls me when he's stumped, so it balances out I think...)

So, not only do Shaw DNS servers suck, apparently their proxy server does too - or maybe just uses the faulty DNS server. For residential service Shaw will not fix this. Jon has asked them before about this, and others at CLUG have commented about the DNS issues with Shaw before. They are effectively saying the residential customers do not deserve proper network support.

If they weren't the only other real choice for broadband than Telus, I would not recommend them to anybody for residential service. (I've never had such problems with the business class service though...) And Telus is even worse in how they setup their networks and abuse their customers... er, no, not abuse - neglect, yeah that's a better word. (Their standard response seems to be "the problem must be how your computer is configured - it's not our problem", even when it is clearly their network setup at fault.)

Sighs - I can't wait until broadband becomes so common place we consumers can get what we pay for.