The Strange Case of No Access - Did I Get Banned???

[Jeff Davis]

For roughly the last 4-5 days I have not been able to get on the Paracast.com or it's forum. Gene (our Gene, MR. Steinberg) helped me to get through what was a truly bizarre connection issue that I still do not understand exactly. Both he and I spent a good deal of time trying to get AT&T (my service provider) to step up and check into the DNS connection issue, but this is seemingly beyond them presently because of the volume of those that their DNS failures are effecting.

This does not seem to effect many AT&T provisional users. I use what they refer to as Uverse which is a bundling of their digital TV/Phone/Internet services.

I am located in the Midwest (Michigan to be exact, the Detroit/Flint area) and for me the experience of trying to get on the forum was exactly like the DNS attack that we all experienced here about two weeks ago. The connection would not establish and would constantly time out.

This post is just an FYI.

If this happens to you, Gene provided the solution and it is EASY. It's honestly far too easy not to appreciate a great deal, so a huge THANK YOU to Gene Steinberg is definitely in order, and assuredly is in play here as well.

If you do have any DNS relevant connection issues, Google and find out about Opendns.com This literally takes a windows user (sorry Gene!) about 1 minute to set up and it's goodbye DNS, BS.

This is NOTHING like Tor. There is ZERO speed decrease and you won't be getting booted off whatever site you are attempting to access because of being associated with a Tor IP address.

Peace/Good To Be Back!
Jeff

 

[Gene Steinberg]

I use Internet Security or DNS Service for your Business or Home - OpenDNS. Not because of any problems, but because it's more secure. There's a lot of information on the site that explains why.

As to your problems, well one of the rude tech support people I called on your behalf did refer to some kind of nationwide problem with the U-verse service, so maybe DNS issues are symptomatic. But just explaining what I wanted to accomplish got the person to hang up on me. So there you go. If U-verse is the only broadband ISP in your city, you're stuck. Otherwise see if you can get similar speeds and comparable prices elsewhere, though support tends to be subpar for ISPs.

 

[Jeff Davis]

I use Internet Security or DNS Service for your Business or Home - OpenDNS. Not because of any problems, but because it's more secure. There's a lot of information on the site that explains why.

As to your problems, well one of the rude tech support people I called on your behalf did refer to some kind of nationwide problem with the U-verse service, so maybe DNS issues are symptomatic. But just explaining what I wanted to accomplish got the person to hang up on me. So there you go. If U-verse is the only broadband ISP in your city, you're stuck. Otherwise see if you can get similar speeds and comparable prices elsewhere, though support tends to be subpar for ISPs.

Thanks Again Gene! We do have Comcast here too. You can believe that I am going to do some investigating there and may make the switch as a result of learning of the AT&T DNS difficulties.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

It's complicated. You need to check bundles, individual pricing, etc. In my environment, I use Phone Power (VoIP) for my regular phone service. It's much cheaper than anything offered by the cable and telecom companies, and gets you free U.S. and Canada long distance, and 60 free overseas minutes (with super cheap per-minute rates after that). TV is DirecTV, and I took advantage of a discount plan with CenturyLink for the ISP. No amount of bundling would get me the same rates, partly because the rest charge higher telephone rates than the Internet phone services. But sometimes two packages will get you a discount.