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I have Vista Home Premium (x64) machine at home. I have www.google.pl set up as my default search engine in IE8.

Sometimes (since one month or so) when I search for something IE gives me "dns error" message and it cannot find www.goole.pl for 10-15 minutes. Frequency: 1-2 times/day. In the same time I checked google.pl on my PlayStation and it's working correctly Sometimes google.com and live.com is not working also.

I have router which I installed few years ago and didn't changed nothing in it since then, so I excluded it as a reason.

After short search on internet I found that nslookup is working without any problem, but ping is not.

When I've try ping -4 www.google.pl the problem dissapears until next time. This is why I think it's a problem with IPv6 and that somehow my Vista is using IPv6 even if it's not working.

I called my ISP but they claim that nothing was changed in their dns and I should search for a problem on my machine.

Yesterday my neighbour - which is using the same ISP - told me that he has the same problem with his Vista (x32), but thought it's google problem. When we talked he admitted that his machine with XP doesn't have any problems

So

  • Is it problem with my machine or my ISP?
  • If it's my machine - how can I find the reason and fix it?
  • If it's my ISP - how can I prove it to them?
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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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It's a problem with your DNS - that may be from your ISP or it may be downstream (ie closer to you). Many home DSL devices default to a mode where they act as a DNS proxy and some of those don't handle ipv6 well at all. If your Vista system's DNS server indicates that it is talking to your ISP then the probability is that their DNS isn't handling ipv6 queries properly, if your DNS address appears to be from your DSL router then the problem is most likely there. Nslookup and ping -4 "work" because they bypass the ipv6 lookup that's failing.

IE8\Firefox\Chrome\Safari all (correctly) issue ipv6 DNS requests before falling back to ipv4. If your DNS (whatever that is) isn't handling these properly then you can see the timeout style behavior you see. The fact that the Playstation appears to work correctly indicates to me that it doesn't support ipv6, or possibly doesn't implement it correctly. Odd as it may seem this type of behavior is intentional, the browser writers want to encourage people to fix ipv6 problems rather than mask them.

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Do you need ipv6? Can you just disable it, at least for testing?

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as yet ipv6 is not essential. I have been having similar problems, but scince dissableing ipv6, the problem has dissapeared. This seems to be an issue with vista only. I have machines running xp, vista, windows 7, linux ubuntu and server 2003. This is not a problem with dns, just appears to be.

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