XBOX + DD-WRT + DHCP = FAIL

Following months of sporadic failures, endless reboots and reconfiguring (With no real time put into solving the issues) I’ve dropped Hyper-WRT for DD-WRT. This seems to have been a good move (Although please see the warning below!) – My connection is much more reliable, feels more responsive (un-proven as yet) and I’m enjoying the extra features that DD-WRT offers (e.g. My router is now over-clocked – Waiting for the burn out in a few days???).

One issue that arose was when I first went to use my XBOX to stream a movie from my PC – Network failure, which when I ran the XBOX network diags I found was a DHCP failure.

Solution – The out-of-the-box configuration for DD-WRT sets a DHCP lease time of 0 – Which XBOX no likey! Since increasing this to 240 minutes, all seems well and good!

One word of warning with DD-WRT – I don’t know if this is a problem with my upgrade/router, but having checked through all the settings following the upgrade, I noticed the WiFi was configured as before, but with security OFF. This is a big problem if you don’t notice it! Months with an open WiFi door will at some point mean hassle!

How to return all NS records for a domain

Today I found out about a handy feature of nslookup.exe which lets you return a list of all zones associated with a given domain name.

You begin by starting nslookup

c:\>nslookup

Then specify the authoritive name server for the domain you are querying:

> server ns.yourisporhostsnsserver.net

Next, issue this command:

ls -d yourdomain.co.uk

This will return all zone records associated with the domain, which can be very useful when you are changing ISP or colo host.