I have been experiencing recurring Domain Name Server failures

[Kelly_in_Vic]

These often occur during wind storms, but particularly on Sundays, such as Sunday Jan 21 and Sunday Feb 18.

Sometimes these DNS outages persist for hours. Without the ability to translate URLs into IP addresses browsing comes to a halt.

Resetting the Optik modem makes no difference.

It affects browsing on all of the ethernet connected devices at my home, Windows and Linux.

Rebooting devices also makes no difference.

Does Telus do some sort of DNS related maintenance on Sundays that makes Wind Storm related service challenges more visible? These DNS outages go on for hours sometimes, with browsers repeatedly saying that they can't find the IP address associated with any URL, even mytelus or google.

Optik TV seems to work during these DNS outages, but I have also experienced slow PVR response during them. Restarting the Digital Box seems to clear up the PVR performance problem, so I have taken to doing that daily. Memory Leak issue or something similar? By slow PVR response I mean that the PVR takes a long time to respond to the controller buttons being pushed, or displays a PVR Busy or other error message.

[Nighthawk]

Weather events will not have any impact on DNS. Especially highly localized weather events. Telus uses multiple DNS servers for redundancy. If you access your modem, look under WAN Connection status on the front page to see which servers your modem is using. Yours may be different than mine.

Mine looks like:

The PVR slow response to the remote is likely a separate issue. 

1. Which Telus modem / gateway are you using?
2. Do you have your own router in addition to the Telus hardware?
3. Are you using the default DNS settings or have you customized them? (Either on the gateway or your devices)
4. You mentioned it impacts ethernet wired devices. What about wireless devices like phones / tablets / PCs / etc?
5. Are your devices set to use a proxy server or VPN?

[Kelly_in_Vic]

1. The browser interface to the TELUS modem shows the Model # as V2000H

2. I have hubs and switches connected to ethernet ports on the modem, but when the DNS problem happens it also happens with devices connected directly to one of the 4 ports on the TELUS modem. The WAN light on the modem is off and nothing is connected to the WAN ethernet port on the modem.

3. I have not customised the DNS settings on any of my windows or Linux devices.

4. I don't use WiFi or bluetooth. See screen shot above. People who use those do not understand the risks they are running. Wireless is disabled on the modem and on all of my devices, by a switch if there is one, and by configuration for the rest. We are not cell phone, pad or tablet people. We live in a cell service black hole even if we were interested in cell phones. 

5. My son occasionally uses VPN for his University course work, but the problem happens even on devices that do not use VPN. None of the devices use Proxy Servers.

[NFtoBC]

I don't experience such DNS issues with the DNS entries supplied by Telus, so can't directly compare.

Of curiosity what are your DNS addresses? I see these in my device:

DNS Address #1:	75.153.176.1
DNS Address #2:	75.153.171.114

You can change your DNS settings in Advanced Setup > LAN IP Settings, if you wish. Some folks recommend Google's DNS at 8.8.8.8, and there are other suppliers of DNS services which you could try, to see if it is the DNS service causing the issue. I doubt Telus' DNS servers are the problem, though. Sounds more like a physical problem somewhere along the line to your home, as weather seems to influence the problem.

[Kelly_in_Vic]

"Sounds like a physical problem somewhere along the line to your home"

Note that I am not one of those folks calling customer support during a power outage to report that my PC is not working.

Power is on, TELUS wire line phone service is working, or I would not have been able to report it, to no resolution except waiting for hours for it to go away, and Optik TV is also working. The internet light on the modem is on and comes back on after being reset.

It can be a long path from a home to a TELUS DNS server.