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Late last week, hundreds of thousands of PlayStation Network users subscribed to Time Warner Cable broadband found their game play interrupted by an “outage” that turned out to be a misconfigured domain name service (DNS) update. Whether Sony was responsible for sending bad data or Time Warner Cable had problems properly integrating the changes, gamers were out of luck for hours Friday until a corrected update could be distributed.
The service outage affected customers relying on Time Warner Cable’s own DNS servers. Customers that dropped Time Warner Cable and their DNS provider were back in business almost immediately. Knowing how to get the best Minecraft Servers could be useful for a gamer.
Broadband customers need not rely on the domain name service offered by your provider. Both Google and OpenDNS offer more robust alternatives, and you can make the switch in seconds.
PlayStation Network users: change your PS3 or PS4 Internet connection setting to manual, changing only the DNS server information.
Everyone else: Check your router manual for the address of the configuration menu.
Choose any two out of these four DNS addresses for your primary and secondary entries:
- Google: 8.8.8.8 and/or 8.8.4.4
- OpenDNS: 208.67.222.222 and/or 208.67.220.220
The TW DNS system has had its issues many times over the years. I use a few DNS upstream servers now. For awhile I was going directly to the root servers. However their performance is not so hot. So I use something like namebench and find servers that a closer and faster.
I don’t know why anyone would choose the root nameservers for home or business connections. They are authoratative, but that doesn’t mean they are faster than Google, OpenDNS, or any other nameserver.
I’d imagine that most people aren’t purchasing broadband service just for their PlayStation or other networked game consoles. They will instead have a home router that acts as an intermediary. In that case, it’s much better to set the nameservers in the router and let the router either act as a caching nameserver for the home LAN or pass that information down to each device on the home LAN through DHCP.