weird DSL problem

[cellio]

We came home to no internet service tonight, but the failure mode is odd. We do have connectivity, but no DNS -- so that would be a well-understood problem, except that I can use ssh to get to my shell provide -- by name. I can also ping that host by name -- but I can't ping anything else by name. Does MacOS maintain some sort of cached state for ssh?

And when did browsers start rewriting IP addresses to domain names? I could visit my favorite web sites by IP address in principle, but when I type in an IP address the browser turns it into a domain name, tries to load that...and fails, because there's no DNS. WTF?

Verizon has been underwhelming so far, and I even mean compared to other Verizon experiences. At one point they said the line must be bad and they'd send a technician in a couple of days, then put us on hold for 10+ minutes. But how could it be a bad line if we have any connectivity at all? When the guy came back he said that there's an outage (previously he had said there wasn't), so with luck it'll come back on its own.

But if anybody reading this could tell me where to find some DNS servers that I'd be allowed to hit, I'd be grateful. I'm trying to find that on my own, but using the phone is slow going.

Comments

[geekosaur]

Browsers don't generally rewrite URLs. Many web servers do; there is a canonical server name which will be used in redirects and such, and generally these days a web server will pick one of foo.com or www.foo.com to be canonical and send a redirect to it if you use the other.

OS X does have a DNS cache; on Leopard and up it's controlled by dscacheutil. Also note that if you are changing DNS in your router, generally that information is sent to clients when they do DHCP renews so you would want to open System Preferences > Network and click the button to renew the DHCP lease. (Although I generally just change the DNS there; you can override what it gets from DHCP. It's hidden under the "Advanced..." button.)

[cellio]

Thanks for the browser/server info.

Oh! Renewing the DHCP lease! Yeah, that would have been a good idea. Thanks for the clue for next time. (I did try changing the DNS there; I've become well-acquainted with those advanced settings.)