Hello BT Community - thank you for allowing me to join.
I have been helping an elderly neighbour in setting up a new PC. He only wishes to use email and do some web surfing so that bit was quite easy.
He called late on Saturday as he was unable to access his email. He immediately thought that the problem was with his PC.
I called in on him yesterday morning and encountered an interesting situation. (I am no network specialist but many decades doing IT support and consultancy have allowed me to pick up a few things!)
To cut a very long list of diagnostic steps short, the problem lay with the DNS servers configured on his home hub to be pretty useless inasmuch as they were not translating domain names, neither IP4 nor IP6 from what I could tell. I could not find out how to change the DNS names too - they are 81.139.56.100 and 81.139.75.100. They did not respond to pings but I assumed that was a deliberate ploy. The neighbour did not think that the fault lay with the home hub as "the blue light is on". Changing the Windows11 primary DNS server to 8.8.8.8 resulted in everything working as it should.
There was nothing obvious in the error log on the router so, I reluctantly rebooted the thing. This resulted in everything working again.
At home we have a couple of Mikrotik devices - mainly as we have a rubbish landline speed in West Wales - and many routers (mainly acting as ethernet hubs) including tp-link and old home hubs. I cannot ever remember encountering a situation where the broadband link is ok but the dns service is dead.
It is sorted now but any information would be gratefully received in case it happens again. Also, is there any way to alter the DNS server addresses on the home hub? I suspect not.
Thank you in advance,
Gerald.
