Recently, I have been having trouble with my internet service. Twice a day, I was kept disconnected from the Internet. Each time I checked using Windows Live Messenger’s troubleshooter, it was the DNS (Domain Name System) that caused the trouble. There was nothing much that I could do, except to keep flushing my DNS settings. Which did not do much good anyway.

The workaround?

OpenDNS. Honestly, I never did care much about DNS even though I know how important it is in our daily websurfing. Without DNS, instead of typing google.com or brokenshardz.net, we would have been typing 64.233.181.106 or 203.211.129.221. The former IP address will probably be able to work, since it should be a dedicated IP address. Whereas, this blog’s IP address would have redirected you to another site. This blog uses a shared IP address. Without it, we would have to memorise IPv6 addresses by now, instead of using only IPv4 addresses. Till now, I have yet to use IPv6 on the machines I used.

However since invalid or incorrect DNS has been a bane at home and OpenDNS promises to be a reliable service. Why not? OpenDNS is free for home users and it is easy to set up. There are paid packages too, but I do not see a need to have more than what have being offered in the basic package for home users.

Remembered that I posted on my VPN woes? Well, it is back. Upon further diving into the murky pool of FAQs and support sites, my school’s VPN is simply non-existent on Singtel’s ATM technology. So at the moment, even with the beta software install, I still do not have VPN service at all! Damn. Maybe I should just turn my laptop in and ask the school IT guys to figure it out. Besides, there are some software that I have yet to install due to some errors which I can’t figure out.