I recently had to face the prospect of working from home one afternoon with no Internet connectivity in the house as the BT Total Broadband was unusually offline. Having spent some time looking into the problem it seemed the network was up but the DNS resolution was down (websites were working fine if you put in the IP address instead of the host and domain name).

This was a relief as it was something we can deal with – until the network comes back online – by overriding the entries in the DNS entry section under the Networking section.

The way to fix this temporarily using Windows XP is to head into Control Panel, then Network Connections.

In the network connection detail panel right-click on the current connection then select Properties.

Within Properties head to the section titled “This connection uses the following items” and scroll through the list until Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is highlighted, then click Properties.

In the next panel that pops up titled “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties” ensure you have the General tab highlighted and look down to find the section “Obtain DNS server address automatically”.

Change the radio button so it is set in the section “Use the following DNS server addresses”.

In the Preferred DNS server field enter 208.67.222.222 and in the Alternate DNS server field enter 208.67.220.220 then click OK, then OK again.

Right-click on the Network Interface again and select Repair – which will refresh DNS bindings. From this point forward I was able to access websites normally.

The thing to remember is to put the setting back to “Obtain DNS server address automatically” as soon as you find out that the DNS issues are resolved.

The entries we have used are from OpenDNS who, once you sign up for an account, provide a host of additional features to help enhance your web surfing experience, including typo correction of domain names, smart cacheing, web content filtering, reports and statistics, phishing protection, and more.

Learn more about OpenDNS.