DSL Outage and D-Link DGL-4500

I awoke this morning to a terrible revelation- my Internet was down!

I did the normal basic trouble-shooting before calling BellSouth- who was equally confused as to what was happening. After a little research I determined that I was not getting DNS resolution. I immediately thought this was a BellSouth issue, but I finally discovered a new ‘feature’ in my D-Link DGL-4500 router.

There is an ‘Enable Advanced DNS Service’ option in the ‘Manual Configure’ page of my Internet settings page":

Checking this box over-rides the ISPs DNS server settings and changes them to:

204.194.232.200
204.194.234.200

If these servers are not responding (as is the case this morning), all DNS lookups fail and web pages/other services can only be reached by IP address.

Unchecking this box allows the router to use the default BellSouth DNS Servers:

205.152.37.23
205.152.150.23

I am not sure if this ‘feature’ was added in the latest v1.20 firmware (that I installed yesterday) or if this was an old feature and the servers went down during the night….