SmartBro Nameserver (Oct 11 09)

I have a SmartBro microwave connection to the Internet. After the Marikina Valley flood, SmartBro disconnected my Internet service. I did not miss my emails, since I could always go to Burger King or McDo to avail of their free wifi service. Also, I lost the AC adapter (12VDC, 2A) of my Linksys wifi router; floodwater can do that to most electrical appliances. I discovered that a replacement AC adapter cost as must as a made-in-China Buffalo wifi router, and so I got the Buffalo instead. Today, I have Internet. Allelluia!

Then I found out that I could not connect to many Internet sites. I could not post to my Multiply blog site, since SmartBro could not find Multiply. Fortunately, I use Ubuntu Linux, not Windows, and am quite familiar with Linux networking. A check of the file /etc/resolv.conf revealed that SmartBro is using a local caching nameserver at 192.168.11.1. I think this nameserver is not properly configured, and so could not give the proper IP addresses of many sites.

If you are a Linux user (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, etc), I suggest that you become superuser (the su command will do the trick) and edit the file /etc/resolv.conf. After editing the file should look like:

# /etc/resolv.conf
#
domain smartbro.net
search smartbro.net
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
nameserver 192.168.11.1

The first two nameservers are those of OpenDNS (see www.opendns.org). OpenDNS provides free domain name service (DNS). Then save the file, and you instantly get proper name service. Now you can reach those sites that 192.168.11.1 was previously unable to reach.

Enjoy!