About a week ago, I was surfing the web on my iPad and tapped a link. Safari tried to load the page but stalled. I waited a minute or so and tried another site to no avail. I tried quitting Safari and re-opening it with the same result. I then tried my girlfriend’s iMac without success.
I opened up AirPort Utility on the iMac, which reported no errors; I restarted the Time Capsule anyway without success. Lastly, I unplugged my Comcast modem for a minute or two to power cycle it. No go. The Time Capsule recognized that it was connected to the Internet, the iPad and the iMac were connected to the network, but no matter what address I typed in, the web browser would just stall.
Thinking I had the answer already, I picked up my trusty iPhone and searched for Comcast in my Twitter app. Hundreds of tweets appeared from all over the country. One of my favorites was “I suppose Comcast doesn’t want me to finish my homework,” while others informed users to try using Google’s of OpenDNS’s DNS servers.
With this information I headed over to the Mac and opened up AirPort Utility. There, under the “Internet” settings, I changed the DNS address to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4, and restarted the Time Capsule. Sure enough, once the Time Capsule came back up after the restart, full connectivity was restored.
DNS servers usually operate to translate the recognizable and memorable domain names like google.com to their respective IP addresses like 173.194.35.104. The address I typed in was for Google’s DNS server. So far, their service has been reliable, even faster, and I have not switched back to Comcast’s address.