Steffie called earlier this evening to tell me the "Internet was down."
There are many possible failure points before leaving our house, but a quick check of some user forums shows the problem was Comcast's and not limited to Connecticut. There are some angry subscribers out there tonight.
Could that have been written to be any more confusing? I think it means it's out... it's still out.
This is related to their DNS servers, the Comcast computers that tell your computers where to find other computers, were down or slowed or otherwise impaired. So, when you type www.geofffox.com, your computer is never told that corresponds to 66.225.220.189. There are rumors, which I can't confirm, that this is some sort of organized attack on the Comcast DNS to route users to infected websites.
There are some simple fixes for users. I talked the husband of a co-worker through the procedure in about 90 seconds. Hopefully that won't be necessary too much longer.
Now that Internet access is being used for everything, including phone service, it's time it became as dependable as a public utility.
I run comcast also, but I never noticed an outage - Since I run my own DNS server. There have been numerous times since the @home days that DNS servers have been problematic causing "outages" - Simply setup your own DNS server on the inside of your lan, you can run it on windows or linux, and point all you lan machines there for name resolution, and you'll be up and running while everyone else is busy calling in outages.