DNS.O.S.
So yesterday we were able to bring Citizen Wausau back to life after days of uncomfortable stasis. To do so meant we had to change the name servers attached to the domain name. Name servers tell the Domain Name Service (DNS) where to look for your site, and the Oops page and the full site are on two different hosts.
Once the name servers get changed, this information can take awhile to propagate to all the different DNS servers out there, as each ISP has their own. Here’s a “pro” tip: Charter’s DNS is notoriously slow to update. When they caution you that these kinds of changes can take 12 - 24 hours to spread through the entire internet, I believe they are talking about Charter specifically.
What can you do? Well, if you are technically-minded (or at least enough to have found this post interesting so far) it’s a pretty simple solution: just change your DNS address in your network settings (where you set your IP address and other information). Open DNS is a great way to start. You can go through the signup rigamarole on the page to add some enhanced functionality, or you can just pull the numbers from the bottom right (208.67.222.222; 208.67.220.220).
Admittedly this is kind of a nerdy change to make, but if you’re comfortable with this sort of thing and you want your internet to be a little bit better, go for it. Plus you’ll never see Charter-branded error pages again!
anonemoose said:
Andy,,
Thank you for the wonderful explanation. But I’m sorry to say that my eyes glazed over before the end of the first paragraph. I’m just not much for some of this technology stuff.
Things seem to be working fine because my bookmark got me to your main page and I was able to log in. Let’s see if this comment actually posts. Someone has already posted a comment on the main page article so we know that part of the site works.
Glad to see you back up and running.
moose
January 26th, 2008 at 6:09 pm #