Hi all, I’m one of the many who have settled on 01.05.04V for my two WDTV Live boxes as it seems to have the least number of irritants (not zero unfortunately). While solving a seemingly unrelated problem on my PC, I’ve stumbled onto a fix that has restored Flingo. Some of you may recall me mentioning in one of my other posts that Flingo mysteriously stopped working on both my players; although I couldn’t find anything out from the web, I had just assumed Flingo changed their web access and 01.05.04 was too old a load to include an update. It wasn’t enough of a loss to compel me to update to the 01.06.xx series, especially considering the Utube fiasco.
Now for the problem; I’ve noticed over time that certain websites located readily by Google were returning “not found” status when I clicked the links. This occurred from any PC on my LAN and was not due to my router and network management server. This was peculiar since the links readily worked at my workplace. I was beginning to suspect some sort of filtering by my ISP, but that was being a bit paranoid. As I looked for a solution, I serendipitously stumbled across a forum debate regarding DNS servers. Some of the participants had uncharitable words about the ISP I happen to be with (one of the very large players in Canada), recommending instead the Google developer’s DNS server at 8.8.8.8. As soon as I changed the DNS address setting on the PCs in the house, the links that were not resolving earlier were now readily connecting. Clearly, the default DNS server that my ISP provides to my router appears to have some peculiar omissions. It’s actually kinda interesting that one of the links it wouldn’t resolve happens to be a forum containing some rather critical opinions on the ISP’s parent company. Hmmm…
This made me wonder if the DNS was affecting the behaviour of my WDTV players. After manually assigning an IP address on the WDTV along with the 8.8.8.8 DNS address (WD please note for improvement: give the AUTO setting the option to manually set the DNS like in Windows), Flingo, which was just moments earlier hanging with the message “internet connection lost”, immediately loaded up and worked. I checked it out over a few days and it remained solidly working. I changed my second player and Flingo started working there too, so it wasn’t something specific to the first player. I should point out that Flingo would on rare occasions work using my ISP’s DNS (via AUTO setting), but most of the time, it just hung with the “internet connection lost” message. It makes me wonder how many of the problems discussed on this forum may be caused by a loopy DNS service. Most ISP subscribers tend to stick with all the default automatic settings, which, in my case, was killing Flingo.
