Last night while doing my usual work and play stuffs with my PC, I noticed a painfully slow connection speed with my SkyDSL internet connection. So I thought that maybe it’s my DSL modem again that’s causing this problem, but when I restarted it, things are still slow. I then tried pinging my ISP’s gateway to check for connectivity and it seems to be ok as well. Just a few minutes after, I couldn’t access any web sites anymore or check my emails.
After doing some routinary networking checks, I found out that the SkyDSL DNS servers are not responding to my PC’s DNS queries. I manually tried using dig(Linux) and nslookup(Windows) to double check the DNS servers and that’s when I found out that there’s a problem with the primary and secondary DNS servers. They are answering to ping requests so it means that the server is up and running, it’s just the DNS services that are having problem it seems.
So what i did is to configure my Virtual Private Server (VPS) to act as my DNS servers by changing the following lines on named.conf:
From:
recursion no;
To:
allow-recursion { xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx; };
*Note: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx denotes my DSL’s static IP address
After saving the configuration on my VPS, reloading the DNS service, and then configure my home PC to use my VPS’ DNS servers, my PC was able to connect again to the Internet and let me do my stuffs. I still need to do couple of tweaks though to speed up the Internet access such as forwarding the requests to my VPS provider’s DNS servers. In named.conf it looks like this:
forward first;
forwarders {
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx;
yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy;
}
*Note: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx denotes the primary DNS server’s IP address and yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy denote the secondary DNS server’s IP address
Well after some this and that tweaks, my Internet connection came back to how it was supposed to be. 
[tags] DNS, Bind, Internet, DSL, Internet Service Provider, SkyDSL, IP Address, connection speed, slow Internet connection, network troubleshooting [/tags]
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