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Russell Mickler, Principal Consultant, has over 17 years of professional experience leading and managing IT organizations.
Comcast 4.13 Outage
Written on April 14, 2005
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Comcast suffered a significant outage affecting a majority of the North American broadband customers on Wednesday April 13. My own broadband was included and I was unable to normally access the Internet.
This issue was related to how the Internet researches a looks-up names – the Domain Name System (DNS) allows friendly names of URL’s to be converted into an IP address. The DNS system exists as a convenience; your computer can actually translate the friendly name to an IP address if it’s preloaded in the right spot. To work around the issue, one can do a little advanced preparation to avoid this kind of problem so that one may be able to access sites regardless of DNS-service outages.
Here’s what you’d do:
1. From Windows, perform a START, RUN, and type in the word, CMD. Hit ENTER.
2. A DOS window will open. At the prompt, type in: ping hostname. Hostname is the name of the resource you wish to always access – say, www.fidelity.com, or www.cnn.com.
3. The machine should respond with, for example:
Pinging www.retail.fidelity.com [155.199.64.238] with 32 bytes of data:
4. See the IP address? 155.199.64.238? Remember that number.
5. Close the DOS window by typing EXIT.
6. Perform a START, FIND, Find File or Folder.
7. You’re looking for a file called hosts – search your hard drive. You should find it under a similar path c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc.
8. If you double-click on the file, you’ll be prompted to supply a program to open up the file with. Select Notepad.
9. Notepad will open.
10. At the end of the file, type in something that looks similar to this:
[ip address] [tab] [hostname]
Example:
155.199.64.238 www.fidelity.com
11. Save the file.
12. Close Notepad.
13. Exit the Search.
This will create a permanent cross-reference to the desired location. I do this for nearly everywhere that I teach online so that I can get on-board if there’s ever a problem like this. Or, if you’re really sophisticated, just go into the IP stack and change the DNS configuration to a new primary (grin).
Either way, you’ll get where you’re going – with or without Comcast.
R
www.micklerandassociates.com
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