I have been having some severe internet problems over the past couple of weeks. Basically, I was unable to connect to many websites - like WordPress, digg, AccessVBA, and many other sites I used to visit frequently.

I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. I was running a tracert on the site from the command line, and it would time out somewhere back in the states - but not at the same router everytime. I sent an email to sprintnet about one, but didn’t figure on getting a response. I got TamiTam to call my local ISP, @nifty, and NTT, but both pointed to the other and gave up.

Finally, I had KDDI on the phone at work for an unrelated matter, and quickly explained my problem and asked for a general suggestion. I was told to change my DNS information. This seemed strange, because I could see the names resolving to IPs, so I figured DNS must be OK, but I had nothing to lose. (I guess there’s more to DNS than just name/IP translation? I need to find out more about this I guess.)

So, I check out the OpenNIC Public Name Servers and threw in the two jp ones (219.127.89.34 and 219.127.89.37), and got rid of the two @nifty ones (202.248.37.74 and 202.248.20.133). And just like that…all is well!

Big ups to OpenNIC and Mickey at KDDI for helping out, and big frowns to @nifty and NTT for being no help at all.