Eircom DSL - DNS Lookups Slow

pauld

When I was helping the 2 family members last night I got the same issue with username and password. Rather than typing them in I just closed the router page down (this was after amending dns and clicking save settings) , launched the internet and it worked.

ShiverinEskimo

When I was tinkering around the night I opened the thread my modem would tell me it wasn't able to log in but if I left it and refreshed the main status page it would. I think eircom's servers don't respond in time for the modem's liking but you get logged in anyways eventually.

decies

I had the same problem as cpu dude i changed to open dns servers ,it started saying username and password wrong,went to bed thinking fec$%^ it up now,nothing working.But this morning its flying!!!

Pablod

decies wrote: »

I had the same problem as cpu dude i changed to open dns servers ,it started saying username and password wrong,went to bed thinking fec$%^ it up now,nothing working.But this morning its flying!!!

Just check your DNS settings again, are they back to eircom settings,
Becuase the DNS issue seems to be mainly happening in the evening,
my connection was working fine this morning using the standard Eircom settings

decies

Pablod wrote: »

Just check your DNS settings again, are they back to eircom settings,
Becuase the DNS issue seems to be mainly happening in the evening,
my connection was working fine this morning using the standard Eircom settings

No there still on open dns settings and am browsing faster than ever,i should,nt change it back again should i

Gods

hey have the netopia 2247 the newer model

this morning i try yet again to get on line at home and no joy. in waterford.
it came up with a sync and nothing else. even after a reboot.

you know with the open dns.. how much of a benifit do u get with getting that free account thing too.. or are just the settings ok..

eircom would wanna cop the F on . i have had this issues 2 times in the space of 5 days.. this time is the worst yet.. I hope someone got fired for the security breach..

measurement

Gods wrote: »

hey have the netopia 2247 the newer model

this morning i try yet again to get on line at home and no joy. in waterford.
it came up with a sync and nothing else. even after a reboot.

you know with the open dns.. how much of a benifit do u get with getting that free account thing too.. or are just the settings ok..

eircom would wanna cop the F on . i have had this issues 2 times in the space of 5 days.. this time is the worst yet.. I hope someone got fired for the security breach..

I know the speed is really bad, so my suggestion might be difficult to carry out, but did you see the posting in this thread about 'clearing out' the history of the DNS calls? It might help clear the gunge out.

Gods

hey Mesurment
didnt see that no can u repost or send page link? in work so have to keep the web use to a minium

decies

just checked the neighbours there using the normal dns servers and are back and running as well.

measurement

Good morning everyone, I hope the dust is settling for you.
Because I'm on a laptop, and use Eircom email accounts as well as others via Outlook (to keep all my email in 1 place), I was reluctant to change the DNS because when I travel abroad I can only receive email, and can't send it due to Eircom's restrictions ('must use webmail or the ISP's SMTP'),
I didn't change to opendns yesterday.
At midnight, the system began to recover which makes me think they had servers down for the repair job, with a deadline of having them back for start of business today, and the shift ended at midnight;). The last bit to recover was their own .net site (keeping people from emailing complaints?:rolleyes:).
This morning I have better internet connection than I've had in months - the speed is fantastic. Maybe everyone in my area has given up and gone to NTL, and the contention has been reduced:D.
But, I'll be watching out this evening again.

shinzon

Gods wrote: »

hey have the netopia 2247 the newer model

this morning i try yet again to get on line at home and no joy. in waterford.
it came up with a sync and nothing else. even after a reboot.

you know with the open dns.. how much of a benifit do u get with getting that free account thing too.. or are just the settings ok..

eircom would wanna cop the F on . i have had this issues 2 times in the space of 5 days.. this time is the worst yet.. I hope someone got fired for the security breach..

When i got the same thing synch and no connection on the dunmore road, i rang eircom and there was an automated message saying that there was a fault in my area and eircom engineers were on site trying to fix it, about 20 mins later it was back up again

Shin

aidanodr

Hi Guys,

DNS 101 - Written in Dummies guide form and simplified as much as possible!

Since my last post on how to change your DNS settings over to OPENDNS, I am glad some more people have learned some new stuff .. maybe

I read some messages after my last post asking questions re fears about changing DNS settings. Read the following, it may help:

DNS is domain name SERVER. Note I have capitalised the word server. Its either an actual computer dedicated to providing a DNS service OR its a computer where one of its jobs is to be a DNS service. In this case more than likely the former. Eircom and other service providers should have numourous computers dedicated to either being domain server computers OR as backup units also.

so what is DNS? SIMPLES, really. If in windows click START, now select RUN and type "cmd" ( no quotes ). Press OK. This opens a good old DOS box. Dont be worried, this is retro stuff, wont be here too long. We now use a command called "ping" ( again no quotes ). At the prompt - c:\ ( something or other probably ) - type:

ping www.rte.ie ( or any other site ) - note you get a string of numbers made up of 4 sets each seperated by a full stop. This is called an IP ADDRESS. RTE's dedicated address is 89.207.56.140

Every website / server on the web is assigned whats called a unique IP ADDRESS. Ping any website you know like above and you will see.

Like my explanation earlier, even your own router ( Bband modem box ) has its own IP Address - usually 192.168.xxx.xxx.

So, lets bring it home. The Internet understands IP Addresses NOT real website names. The Internet system understands 89.207.56.140 NOT www.rte.ie. SO, when you type / request www.rte.ie in your web browser address bar alot happens in the background. You type the address, something somewhere has to translate it to those meaningful string of numbers called the IP Address that the Internet understands. TAA DAA, our friend the DNS Server. A web address is often called a domain name .. so the DNS Server, a Domain Name Server. These servers basically contain translation tables - from domain names to their unique IP Addresses. So heres your request:

http://www.rte.ie in your browser address bar ==> enter ==> eircom DNS server translates domain name to ip address ==> 89.207.56.140 ==> rte website appears in your browser.

OK, thats the science bit over. With respect to the current EIRCOM issue, when you hear that their is a DNS issue it basically means the Eircom DNS servers are not translating addresses very well for some reason ( in this case the DNS servers got hacked it appears ).

As I said in my earlier mail I have been using the opendns servers for years though my BBand is with Eircom. AGAIN THEIR IS NO HARM DONE by using alternative DNS Server services. I am sure their are many other such services out on the internet also for you to try.

If you feel you must you can revert back to the EIRCOM DNS addresses in the future, but you do not have to.

I should also say with respect to OPENDNS - go to the site www.opendns.org and sign up FOR FREE. Your account with them has some real nice features even down to content filtering for the kids and statistics in general. Again - up to you, you do not have to sign up. Their is no catch!

Cheers
Aidan

measurement

Gods wrote: »

hey Mesurment
didnt see that no can u repost or send page link? in work so have to keep the web use to a minium

Hi there,
I did try to find it just now, but can't. I'm going to print Aidan's post (and save a link) for the future.
I imagine that if your home pc has been off since last night, and you switch the router off and on this evening, it should be cleared out already (now, don't all shout at once that that is not a technical solution and would be accidental coincidence!:o)

decies

thanks aidan now that i changed over to open dns last night and working well,but i see the normal eircom dns working well as ever apparently.
Will i be better to sticking with open dns then ,thanks.

aidanodr

measurement wrote: »

.. Because I'm on a laptop, and use Eircom email accounts as well as others via Outlook (to keep all my email in 1 place), I was reluctant to change the DNS because when I travel abroad I can only receive email, and can't send it due to Eircom's restrictions ('must use webmail or the ISP's SMTP') ....

Hey measurement,

Yip this is an issue with Eircom Email address POP and SMTP settings when setting up the account in outlook. That is even if you have another non eircom addy you have to set the smtp server to mail1.eircom.net or mail.eircom.net.

Re the abroad thing - I switched to GMAIL a while back. In GMAIL you can add up to 5 other email addresses you use to its settings. GMAIL then collects mail centrally for all these addresses.

I find it interesting you can only recieve and not send. You may need to further tweak the OUTLOOK settings. In outlook settings you generally have MORE SETTINGS, then a tab OUTGOING SERVER, tick "My outgoing server ( smtp ) requires authentication" and either select the "use same settings as incoming" OR type in your account username / pword again. I think their is something similar in Outlook express.

I use both MOZILLA Thunderbird and Eudora as email clients here with Eircom addresses AND using OPEN DNS IP's with no difficulty. I dont think changing DNS IP addresses is your problem here? Again Its just my opinion, others may disagree ..

Aidan

Gods

ah no worries.. ill try my system again tonight.. ill be back in a while

aidanodr

decies wrote: »

thanks aidan now that i changed over to open dns last night and working well,but i see the normal eircom dns working well as ever apparently.
Will i be better to sticking with open dns then ,thanks.

Hey Decies,

Literally and me not being smart, it is really up to yourself. Now you know how to switch around so I would say travel along with OPEN DNS for the moment, then at some point if you feel like it, try the Eircom DNS IP's again. At that point compare.

Personally I find OPENDNS alot more solid, less prone to "strange happenings". Over the years I have found Eircom DNS to get flaky for small periods. Also with OPEN DNS if a site fails it interjects with a sainer screen telling you and giving you plain info.

While on OPEN DNS go to the www.opendns.org site and sign up for free. No fallout here, you end up with a dashboard when you log in with some nice tools for you to use. Its all in dummies guide type format, easy to figure.

SO - with opendns you do not just get the IP Addresses but also an optional account online with useful tools.

Bottom line, personal preference - no harm staying or moving.
Aidan

PaddyTheNth

Shame that Eircom have taken a Great Wall of Silence approach to this.

It would be nice if they just said "We've been the target of a DNS poisoning attack, it could happen to anyone, these are the steps we're taking to prevent it happening again."

They really need to step up on this because from the looks of things this was a relatively poorly executed attack...maybe even just a test run.

If the attackers had gone to the trouble of reproducing the sites for the major banks, paypal, webmail providers and the e-commerce sites - I did read someone saying they'd seen a dodgy ebay page but haven't heard it confirmed anywhere - instead of just redirecting to ad revenue-generating search portals they could have done serious damage.

cian1500ww

I'm an opendns user as well and I have to say it was a huge improvement over UTV's dns. Its well worth a try.

romdjoll

Thanks again for the open DNS info - works like a dream.

I still don't get why Eircom won't say anything about what's going on. I took Sunday's outage on the chin as "one of those things" but last night I was a bit miffed about it (I has important gaming to do, ya know!). Rang Eircom, sat through the recording and was hung up on during the transfer to an agent, rang back, same thing. Went from being miffed to being furious. I know the agents were probably sick to the back teeth of answering the same questions over and over again, but hang-ups just make them look frightened and useless. Does nothing for any type of faith in their service.

I have worked in a call-centre, I wasn't about to yell at anyone, I just wanted to know what they were doing to fix the DNS servers...

Given that this is ongoing (and hitting at the same time each day), it's starting to look like they don't know what to do to fix it, and that's not a good impression to give people. If they took the servers down, well and good, if it's fixed now, grand, but the lack of information while people had no effective access to their broadband is hard to stomach. I'll be staying with open DNS for the foreseeable.

Sully

You can stick with OpenDNS (sign up for an account for the additional features if you like) on any ISP (Eircom, BT, UTV) - it doesnt matter who you use for DNS (though some simply wont allow you use theirs) once you use someone

As for the silence from Eircom - very unusual but I would assume they wont openily admit to being hacked (if they were at all) and its probably going to take a while from the chain of command to reach customer service. The suggested type of DNS hack, while only minor in this instance, should be rare for such a big company.

ven0m

Sully wrote: »

As for the silence from Eircom - very unusual but I would assume they wont openily admit to being hacked (if they were at all) and its probably going to take a while from the chain of command to reach customer service. The suggested type of DNS hack, while only minor in this instance, should be rare for such a big company.

If you just signed a €2m euro deal for data centre services with the HSE for secure holding of data, applications, digital documents relating to patients etc - would you be announcing you had your DNS services compromised?

Bummer

Just if you havn't seen it yet >> DNS outage

aidanodr

Just do a quick search for EIRCOM at google news:

http://news.google.ie/news?pz=1&ned=en_ie&hl=en&q=eircom

As of 1pm 07/07/09 the top two headlines are:

Eircom confirms DNS outage at Siliconrepublic.com

AND

Eircom sets up National Health Data Centre at Telecompaper

Just as Ven0m said, doesnt that inspire confidence?

Two links:

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/article/13367/cio/eircom-confirms-dns-outage
http://www.telecompaper.com/news/article.aspx?cid=679962

Aidan

BothBarsOn

Just wanted to add my thanks for the opendns tip. Bit of a life-saver.

Yay opendns!
Boo eircom!

Sully

Love the excuse..

Customers may have recently experienced delays in web browsing and may have been unable to access the Internet. In some cases, customers may have been redirected to incorrect websites.

This issue has been caused by an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic being directed onto our network, and this impacted the systems and servers that provide access to the Internet for our customers.

eircom is working continuously to minimise the impact for customers and has taken a number of steps, including software updates and hardware interventions, to fully restore internet service.

Source: http://eircom.ie/cgi-bin/bvsm/bveircom/bladerunner/displayNews.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1638619066.1246971412@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccciadehjldhfegcefeceiedffndffj.0&site=Res&chanId=0&newsItemId=Internet%20Service%20Announcement

Hank Scorpio

My net was down all yesterday evening and night, only came back on a few hours ago, Kilkenny area.

Using OpenDNS DNS servers too. Hopefully its sorted now.. :rolleyes:

me-skywalker

will us regular ericom users have to change the settings themselves cause ild be wary of messing around with my settings or will it automatically be updated

also they better take this into accoutn when making next months bill!! i wont be payin for useless service!


could this be an advertising hack by these OpenDns server ppl! thats all im hearing about!! ild rather a practical solution or a fix to this problem rather than chagne to some otr server!

Hank Scorpio

me-skywalker wrote: »

will us regular ericom users have to change the settings themselves cause ild be wary of messing around with my settings or will it automatically be updated

You mean the DNS settings? They`ll probably stay the same as the original eircom DNS servers, you should just change to open dns, instructions on how to do so a few pages back in this thread.

also they better take this into accoutn when making next months bill!! i wont be payin for useless service!

Good luck with that :rolleyes:

could this be an advertising hack by these OpenDns server ppl! thats all im hearing about!! ild rather a practical solution or a fix to this problem rather than chagne to some otr server!

Nope

Sully

me-skywalker wrote: »

will us regular ericom users have to change the settings themselves cause ild be wary of messing around with my settings or will it automatically be updated

also they better take this into accoutn when making next months bill!! i wont be payin for useless service!


could this be an advertising hack by these OpenDns server ppl! thats all im hearing about!! ild rather a practical solution or a fix to this problem rather than chagne to some otr server!

A lot of this has been said already but I will re-cap as its a big enough thread to read through.

Nearly (if not all) Internet Service Provider and major organisation will have their own Domain Name Servers (DNS) which allow applications such as Web Browsers and Email Applications preform Name Server (NS) lookups. This is required because without, we would be unable to visit websites unless we remembered each websites IP address (which is a set of numbers like 192.168.1.2). So a name server will store information on which IP to visit for any given domain name (eg www.example.com). Thats the short and simple version.

There are loads of nameservers out there - nearly every college, university, corporate company, internet provider etc. has their own. If someone was to gain unauthorised access and modify what IP a domain name belongs to - then you would be redirected to that website.

In this case, it looks like someone has done that with Eircoms so that a lot of popular websites Eircom users would visit instead went to advertising portals. The goal? Whoever did the hack would make a lot of advertising revenue as thousands of people would be redirected to these advertisement portals, thinking they are going to the likes of RTE, Facebook or even Twitter. Are you lucky? If Eircom was hacked, the hacker could have done much worse by pointing common domain names to websites which would download viruses/malware on your computer. Instead, they choose to just make money by sending people to advertising portals.

The solution? You can use whatever nameservers you like as long as they are trusted and you have permission. OpenDNS is a free, widely respected and trusted alternative DNS provider which allows people to use their service which they claim to be more reliable and safe. You can switch back and forth as much as you like - from Eircom to OpenDNS, OpenDNS back to Eircom. There is no harm and you will not loose anything by changing these simple settings.

So, now that you know how crucial name servers are and if you are having difficulties (regardless of your ISP) accessing many websites like Eircom customers have been - then use OpenDNS which is the safe and free alternative. https://www.opendns.com/start