Post by anonAfter the farcical service that I've experienced for the last 3 days Its
going to take a bit more than that to make me switch to Virgin ADSL. The
weird thing is the sheer number of ISPs with customers who'd like to burn
down their premises. It appears to be the age old British problem where
competition does not result in pressure to improve or even maintain
standards. In the case of Virgin, the service standard now has slipped badly
compared to the standards the same company a few years ago. Even if I
ignore the unreliability there are things like reducing maximum email size,
completely bizarre.
Virgin Net customers certainly have had to put up with some serious
problems over the last week or so: incoming email hassles, logging
in/verification failures, and now something which to the user appears as
a failure of the DNS system - you can log in, ping some servers with IP
addresses, but all attempts at accessing servers by their domain names
fail. That last one appears to be intermittent but ongoing. Yesterday on
several occasions I had to log in half a dozen times before it worked.
Extremely annoying when you're trying to get on with something.
Funny thing is, a neighbour trying to set up broadband with BT has been
experiencing exactly the same "DNS" problem. I don't know the people
very well, so I'm not sure whether their problems persist. It may just
be a total coincidence of course.
Talking of coincidences, just before the "DNS" problems started,
Microsoft update KB887742 popped up. So I downloaded and installed it,
then started having the "DNS" problems (coincidence?), noticed the WINS
LMHOSTS option was enabled, disabled it, tried again, worked that time
(coincidence?), so I thought KB887742 had set the LMHOSTS option on and
that was the cause of the problem. Not so! This morning I switched
LMHOSTS back on myself and it's connected first time with no problems.
All of which just goes to show how you can so easily confuse yourself.
Sorry to waffle on.
John