Windows

Life Without Google

Posted by on Sep 19, 2007 | One Comment

Gnomie stormko! from San Diego writes:

I have not been able to access any Google Web site for the last seven hours. I contacted my ISP (Cox) and it said that there was a problem with resolving Goggle’s DNS. Is this a common problem? You would think that Google can’t afford for its Web services to be inaccessible for such a long time. Even Web sites that use Google Analytics would not finish loading as my browser started trying to access the Analytics info. And the YouTube embeds on your site would not load.

I never realized just how much Google “owns” my Internet thought process until I wasn’t able to access it. I went to Yahoo! and MSN and it felt out of place (bad for them). I was hoping Google would come back so I could feel comfortable again. How unnerving it is to know that Google has such power.

I ended up using Open DNS in order to “live” again.

[tags]google, open dns[/tags]

  • http://alexicom-consulting.net John Alexander

    As a network consultant, I have run into issues (notice, plural!!!) with Cox having stale DNS information in the past. Symptoms have ranged from users on the Cox network not being able to reach singular web sites “out there” intermittently, to one customer, a law firm, who was not able to receive mail from any other entity that used Cox as their ISP. It turns out that this firm had been a Cox customer for web-hosting and ISP services two-and-a-half years earlier, but had changed to a DSL-based ISP service. Cox still had them in their internal DNS servers as an internal customer, so, once the mailboxes filled up (which shouldn’t have existed on Cox anymore because they had been moved), anybody that was a Cox customer that sent them mail was told the mailbox was full.
    The fact that your problems went away after switching to OpenDNS servers, tells me that, yet again, Cox continues to set the bar for DNS and customer support!!!