DNS Server cannot be reached...

[Emmitt Jay DeLong II]

Bit of a setup, sorry. I had been using WoW internet in Ohio for several years. They were bought out by Breezeline(BL). During that time the most of a problem I had was yearly maintenance needed on the line to keep a decent connection. Despite this, I went ahead and bought my own modem/router combo to save money. It worked for about 9m and then it died. The issue was the Wi-Fi broadcast signal would go from decent, to no strength standing next to the device on the 5.0 channel. I am not hard on the device(s) and only use them for the intended purpose. Still, it annoyed me. I went out and bought an Arris Surfboard AX3000. This was before the BL buyout. Right after the buyout, there were several months where work was being done to the lines and service was suboptimal. That said, BL was diligent in giving rebates and refunds for poor service. This was probably 8 months ago and in the interim months it has been stable and great. So great in fact that I went and upgraded to 1Gbs down.

Flash to about 5 weeks ago. I start having issues with sporadic internet access. The network would read fine. Green lights across the router status page. But I was still unable to connect or have slow access for a while. Then, about 3 weeks ago the issues elevated to total loss of internet. Again, green across the board and no reported issues from the router page. Windows, however, returned the same issue, "... cannot connect to the DNS server...". This is a paraphrase; I apologize but I'm irritated and now I can't remember the exact wording. Now, I've found some online instructions to walk through. Flushing the DNS seems to work fine. I had tried to reset the PC before but the results were not good. Same goes with the modem. Resetting that isn't always successful AND neither should be expected on a daily basis. I've asked Google and the vast majority of the returns all put blame on the router but if that's so then I have bought two routers in the past year and both were defective. I'm unlucky in a lot of things but this seems farfetched. So, advice please. If it is the equipment then please help me secure a device that won’t die on me again in a 10 months’ time frame. Otherwise, I should just rent their damn devices and be done with it. Also, I'm not rich. The price is an issue for me so something that isn't above $275 USD please. It will need Wi-Fi but not Bluetooth.

If not, what could the issues be. I can provide some general information but there’s little to be surprising in the offering. I'm not doing anything advanced or experimental, PC vise that is.

PC: Windows 10, i9-9900K, RTX 2080 FE, 16BG RAM, onboard audio, MB is an ASUS Prime - Z390 - A, NIC is the MB connection.
General use: YouTube, Facebook, Discord, game(s)

The only outlier is use time, I'm disabled and spend 16h to 20h a day on the PC and internet. But I'm not convinced that’s much of an issue.

I'm becoming very frustrated. In the time between beginning this write up and trying to post it my internet decided to again crap out. And yet again, it was a generic "cannot connect to the DNS server..." error. I'm not sure what to do.

Again, sorry for the length. I'm not really great at networking, and I'm not sure what information is useful. So better to have and not need, then need and not have.

Regards
Emmitt

[JLssg4]

(Non-technical, anecdotal) I had a similar/same issue almost a year ago, some days would be fine and others would result in that 'DNS server not responding' type error all the while the modem was showing all green (all good).  ISP tech came over and tested their modem...boom everything resolved.  [The original modem was only a couple months old and certainly wasn't the cheapest model available.]  I just settled on renting their modem since troubleshooting, the tech, and internet searches wasn't yielding any other working option.  My router was seemingly uninvolved...worked fine immediately after swapping modems.

If you're desperate for the quick fix I'd definitely give the ISP's rentable modem a shot. 

[I had pretty well forgotten about it...so I'll be interested to see if anyone has a more technical/productive idea or solution.  My rental cost isn't terrible (at least relative to the service itself), but it would be like found money if somehow mine could be put back in service.]

[191x7]

Try manually setting DNS in the router to Google 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 or Quad9 9.9.9.9 and retry. The ISP DNS might be a bad one.

[Emmitt Jay DeLong II]

59 minutes ago, 191x7 said:

Try manually setting DNS in the router to Google 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 or Quad9 9.9.9.9 and retry. The ISP DNS might be a bad one.

I forgot that was an option. I'll set it up and try it tomorrow. As for the IPv6 options, I'm not finding any. Mind shooting one out if you have one? I'll try again but it's tough when the results from a search return the same thing (8.8.8.8) even though you specify IPv6 or nothing when you do the same search but add -IPv4.

EDIT: I found it. I just had to think clearly. It's late and I'm tired of fussing over this, lol. I thank you all for the advice. Here's hoping it'll work for the forseeable future. If not, I'll have to try something else.

[Emmitt Jay DeLong II]

I have returned. I followed the advice to the best of my knowledge.

1.) I changed the properties of the adapters IPv4/IPv6 with a specific DNS server address, using 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4/2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844.
2.) I changed the settings in my router to use the same DNS servers.

I had hoped this would fix my connection issues. I woke up this morning and was online for about an hour before my browser stopped working. While the error was not labeled the same the errors were listed as the DNS server could not be reached. I was able to restore the setting to default without any success. I disabled and then enabled the device via the network settings menu and it fixed the connection issues. I'm beginning to wonder if my onboard Ethernet port may be the issue. I updated the device driver earlier this month BUT it was after the issues were already occurring.

I still cannot trace the error. If it's my router, then I’m looking at a $275 US fix. If it's my Ethernet port, I'm looking at about a $25 US fix. Is there any way to determine which it is? I know I could always hit up a new NIC. If I'm wrong, I wont be able to return the NIC and my effective resource pool for the router modem is reduced by the NICs cost. Wit’s end is a bit of a frustrating place to be but I feel like I'm there.

Advice would be appreciated.

[OddOod]

On 5/20/2023 at 11:36 AM, Emmitt Jay DeLong II said:

specific DNS server address

When this problem occurs, what happens if you pop open a CMD window and try

ping 8.8.8.8

? 

 

[Emmitt Jay DeLong II]

1 hour ago, OddOod said:

When this problem occurs, what happens if you pop open a CMD window and try

ping 8.8.8.8

? 

 

Cannot connect. I have /ping, modem ping, and modem traceroute. All return errors. The /ping, I don't specifically remember off hand. It returns just like it would if it cannot connect though.

[OddOod]

On 5/23/2023 at 1:20 PM, Emmitt Jay DeLong II said:

Cannot connect. I have /ping, modem ping, and modem traceroute. All return errors. The /ping, I don't specifically remember off hand. It returns just like it would if it cannot connect though.

Interesting. Do you have any other devices connected to the network that you could test with? If you can ping the DNS server with that, then you know it's your computer. If not, it's upstream of that.
If nothing is getting through my next step would be to try and assess the temp of the device. Those combo units heat the hell up and can lead to service drops. Back when I was on the SB8200 I ended up ziptying a case fan to the side of it and plugging it into wall power. Even had that issue on my old Archer C7 router which was fixed with a cheap USB powered laptop cooling pad. Both of those problems lead to soft crashes which looked like this. The cooling almost eliminated the problems

 

One very low chance issue is that your ISP might be just straight blocking alternative DNS servers, but that's pretty beyond the pale.