Primary & Secondary DNS 'missing'?
 

The dreaded OpenReach (BT contractors) back AGAIN in the road - this time 3 vans.
B/band drops to 160kb down. Recycle router, back to 'impressive' 2700kb. Then no connection, but appear to be able ?to send emails?. Ping dead.

I look in the router (3Com Office connect) at the 'ATM PVC Status' page and it shows NO primary or secondary DNS. A 'disconnect' and 'reconnect' on that page restored them to normal. Any ideas what happened?

Bad news
 

Run an Anti virus check ASAP for ZOTOB. It has the habit of attempting to alter the DNS settings on your router.

CAT III

Ta CatIII - Malware scan in progress, but I do not see the signature files or registry entries SO I think BT have to take some blame here.

It's not that uncommon to have to power cycle something after an ISP outage, in order to pick up new DHCP parameters.

This is sort-of consistent with the symptoms ... if you imagine that sending emails used an existing DNS cache entry, and either this just worked or it didn't matter that it was wrong because your ISP is running an SMTP proxy on port 25 anyway.

I wouldn't worry about it.

Thanks for the reassurance, GTW - its just that I have had an ongoing issue with speeds with the ISP for some time (I'm convinced it is a BT issue but you probably know how difficult that is to resolve when you are not a 'customer':ugh:) with drops to 160kb generally after the OpenReach cavalry have made one of their frequent vists to the road. Roll on the 21st century........................... I understand I am on 1950's cabling which runs BELOW the 'new' access chambers of BT and there are rumours that I have Rhodesian aluminium cables in the road too!

Virgin cable modem. You get the speed you pay for. Wouldn't touch this ADSL rubbish with a barge pole - piggybacking on Victorian phone lines, biggest ever cowboy technology con!

Unfortunately we second class citizens who live in the country have no choice, gross mismanagement by the Thatcher government meant we were left out in the technological wilderness.