Trouble in SHAWville

Been having some problems with my internet as of late in that sites seem to take forever to resolve. Refreshing IP's, rebooting routers and cable modems having zero effect on the situation. A call to tech support, first playing Mr DumbAss hoping I could finagle a simple reset of whatever shaping software they have running, then playing Mr TooMuchInformation and asking questions about VOIP bottlenecks and unthrottled torrent ports vs encryption. Neither approach garnered me a solution that lasted longer than 5 minutes after the call. Having just recently upgraded the firmware in my router, it occurred to me a new setting or feature may be the culprit so I dove in for a closer look.

Seems the router defaults to using a third party DNS resolver with little or no information on who or why, "a security ready DNS server" isn't exactly information. So I removed the DNS servers, placing the correct IP's in their place and jumped back on the web. Same resolving issue, slow and painful. After a little research, there appears to be a large group sharing this problem with said provider. Remembering good old OpenDNS that I suggest to anyone looking to stop porn traffic for their youngsters, I filled in their DNS server IP's.

It worked.

I created an account for OpenDNS to remove the filters as I for one want all the results when I search the term beaver. Like DynDNS, OpenDNS needs to be informed when your IP changes so I examine the software they have for just that. Inadyn is a handy command line updater that can be run as a service, even better it can update DynDNS servers as well. Strangely the version on OpenDNS's Support Page is newer so grab it from there instead and as a side note, the command line "--iterations 1" will run it once and exit instead of staying resident.

Update: On further inspection the "security DNS server" IP address 204.194.232.200 resolves to 302DirectMedia.com which in turn is a division of OpenDNS so I may have gone full circle back to my problem. I will post more after further testing...