DNS Problems on Excitel Broadband

From what I have seen, Excitel does not let you use custom DNS servers like Google Public DNS or OpenDNS. Unless you are using VPN, you are using Excitel's own DNS servers.

This is generally fine but I am having issues with bunch of domains that are inaccessible randomly.

Right now I cannot access linksredirect.com for example even though it is supposed to be up. clnk.in is also not working though it seems to be down as per downforeveryoneorjustme.com. yesterday, i had to use vpn to order a product through ebay because ebay india was struggling to load on excitel.

just curious if you guys have also faced similar issues.

Update: Both clnk.in and linksredirect.com are working if I use VPN so the problem is definitely with Excitel's DNS Servers.

Excitel users, please check these two domains and confirm if they load at your end!

strange. i cant access both of them with and without VPN . are these sites up ?
clnk.in gives error 404 and linksredirect.com says that i cant access for some reason

An error occurred.
404 Not Found

Getting these two. This is alright. Because the domains are used for redirection. As long as they load, they are working fine.

Hi Guys,

there is a purpose in what we do.

Ensuring customers use our DNS servers and not some Public DNS, we provide same experience to everyone.

If you just allow Random use of DNS, some customers will (without knowledge) use them and get poor performance as general and will think this is because of Excitel, but in reality it is because customer is using DNS that today decided to respond slowly or to not work at all....

Also, only if Customers use our DNS servers they will get maximum benefit from our Local Peering and CDN agreements and will fetch traffic locally, which again improves experience, and if they use even google dns (8.8.8.8) or other Public DNS, they can fetch an Indian site from Outside of India with 200+ ms delay which will spoil the experience...

So the only way we can ensure maximum localization of content is to provide Local DNSes and to ensure everybody uses them....

The above comes with some trade off of course. Sometimes a site owner breaks his DNS records and the site becomes inaccessible if DNS records are quickly updated with the wrong ones (as we do in our case) and the site can remain reachable if user uses Public DNS that caches results for hours.

Again here, customer thinks if the site is not opening on Excitel, but opening on Other ISP (where I use Public DNS) it's for sure Excitel issue 🙂 but this is not always true... it's Site issue, but due to the way Excitel uses DNS (keep small cache, try to always check with Root DNS servers) it's more quickly that the issue of the Site is surfaced to its users. Once the Site realizes they broke DNS records, they fix it and in this moment it is fixed for all users of Excitel as well.

We believe we are doing the right thing 🙂

Anyone else feeling the issue right now? :emoji_sweat_smile:

fixed now.

Nothing still loading here :emoji_ghost:

No other dns is working besides excitels own.
Tried google and open dns , both failed.

Can anyone explain whats going on?

Even Automatic option is not working for me. I wonder if they are blocking third party dns?

automatic option works but you have to make sure to have set it to automatic on both windows and router settings.

Can't seem to find where Google is still defined. And what the fuck is wrong with Excitel?

I mean people are happy with what they are delivering. They just have to fuck it up for whatever stupid reasons they have to enforce their own dns.

manually adding the excitel dns seems to have helped. excitel guy informed me on telegram that the issue is resolved at their end. so this is how it is going to be? i wonder how many people would find their net fucked up in the morning? assuming this is a permanent change?

I am not sure if Chromebooks can be configured to use custom DNS servers. Would find out in the morning if net is working on dad's laptop.

Even my Android phone cannot load any website because of this issue probably because Android also defaults to 8.8.8.8.

Would need to define a static local IP to it from the looks of it if I have to configure a custom DNS on it. What a freaking mess.

my pi would not connect to internet because it also defaults to google dns. wah re excitel. band baja diya.

it resets resolv.conf file on every reboot. would need to research now if this behavior can be changed.

Tried but could not configure the wireless on the Android phone to work on this new retard system. I have three routers in the house with the same SSID connected to the same Excitel router. Not sure if I can configure the phone to roam on them with static ip configured.

As suggested, did you try setting default Excitel DNS in the Excitel routers (and maybe your other routers) but setting custom DNS like 8.8.8.8 in the OS of your various devices?

Android and Chrome OS does not use the router's settings. They default to Google's.

And they do not have an internal option where you can change the dns servers. AFAIK.

Android Configuration instructions for OpenDNS

This is how you change DNS Server on Android. And this does not seem to work for me. Plus my three routers have three different gateways I believe.

In any case, this is not an optimal scenario. I should not be forced to use Excitel's DNS servers. An Android device owner should not be required to perform this who static ip bullshit just to connect to my home wireless network.

Managed to get it working on my Android. Would need to configure 3 different devices at home in the morning (two androids and one chromebook). If Excitel can confirm that this is a permanent 'feature', I would rather apply for Den Boomband.