No Internet - can anybody help please?

[SmokeMeAKipper]

Hello.

I'm with Post Office broadband and for some reason I don't have Internet access. It was fine Monday night - playing Call of Duty 4 on my 360 and general surfing. Came home from work yesterday and neither of them worked. No web pages come up and when I ran the connection tests on my 360 I got a DNS error.

I rang up the Post Office technical support and they talked me through all of the usual ("Have you tried restarting your machine?" - gee thanks for that!) and eventually got to pinging addresses, running ipconfig from the command prompt and going into the router itself. However, there still isn't anything wrong - all the correct lights are on on the router itself (it's a Netgear one by the way) and it says it's connected with a downstream of 7000-odd kbps (as usual). They say I've got an IP address etc and there's nothing wrong with the line. Eventually they literally just said there was nothing they could do and to see if it gets any better after a few days. My PC is connected via ethernet cable and all of my consoles and my Dad's laptop wirelessly but none of them can get online (they can all connect to the router though).

What I can't understand is why this has magically happened for no reason? Anybody got any ideas? Suggestions? I've reset the router several times but I honestly don't think it's that or the settings on it.

[CMcK]

The fault is at their end by the sound of it. Get back on the the phone and tell them to reset your connection and give you a fresh IP address.

[Number45]

Can you ping 158.43.128.72?

If you can, try the following from a command prompt:

D:\>nslookup

> server 158.43.128.72
Default Server: cache0000.ns.eu.uu.net
Address: 158.43.128.72

> www.google.com
Server: cache0000.ns.eu.uu.net
Address: 158.43.128.72

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.google.com
Address: 82.98.86.169

So you need to type the three commands after the > symbol. You may get a slightly different response to mine, but if you get an IP address resolved for Google on that DNS server then the problem is likely to be with whatever DNS service you use.

You can specify different ones though, and the one I've given you is open to all. I use it at home myself.

EDIT: If you can get in the IRC channel (#ntsc-uk.com on Quakenet (Or click here)) I can help you in there.

[EvilBoris]

try going to opendns.com and set up your router with their DNS servers

on your router you want to find a place to put these alternate DNS servers

208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

[MonkeyWrench]

Have you tried actually rebooting the router itself? Mine does the same thing occasionally, even though it says it has a connection to the net and everything looks to be ok.

[SmokeMeAKipper]

It was still not working last night - I'll try some of your suggestions when I get home from work and see if it helps.

I have rebooted the router though - that's one of the things the Post Office suggested but no luck. Will let you know how I get on...

[SmokeMeAKipper]

How thoroughly bizarre - got home from work today and voila... Internet working again now!

No idea what the problem was but everything seems OK now (before I'd tested any of your suggestions) - thanks for all those who've posted, much appreciated.