U-Verse DNS Problem

[bdcusa]

I have been trying to download the latest ATI video drivers and have found that I cannot get them.  The address for the download is:

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/12-3_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc.exe

When I click on the link to get the file, however, there is no response and eventually the link times out.  Doing a ping test, it seems that the DNS lookup points www2.ati.com to:

wpc.658C.att-acdn.net [12.120.106.146]

Using another ISP, the DNS lookup reveals the following:

wpc.658C.att-acdn.net [12.120.140.146]

Switching DNS servers on one of my U-Verse-connected machines to the Public DNS servers provided by Google (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) also results in the 12.120.140.146 address and allows download of the file. 

 I would ask that U-Verse look into this and correct it.

[SomeJoe7777 ACE - Geek]

That doesn't necessarily indicate any kind of problem with AT&T's service.

Some companies use round-robin DNS load balancing to point downloads to multiple different servers. The load balancing sometimes uses the source IP address as part of the algorithm to choose a server. It's possible that with your source IP address on AT&T, you're pointed to one of ATI's servers, and with a different ISP (and therefore a different source IP address) you get pointed to a different server.

Another reason could be that the servers point to a Content Delivery Network, where the download server will be selected as the server that is closest to you on the network. Indeed, this looks probably in this case since the letters "cdn" appear in the hostname.

In either case, it's possible that the server you're getting connected to is having some sort of issue.

[bdcusa]

It has been like this for over a month.  I doubt that ATI would allow such an issue to continue for that long.

As for the idea that it may be a content delivery network, I would expect that it would be one owned and operated by ATI rather than AT&T as the ATT-ACDN in the address implies.

Further, their site worked just fine for my U-Verse connection until about a month ago.  Since that time, I have tested it various times and found that U-Verse continually failed but the alternate provider I use works just fine.  It wasn't until today that I began to actually investigate the problem and found the error in the DNS lookup on the part of AT&T. 

[Computer-Joe ACE - Guru]

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bdcusa wrote:

It has been like this for over a month.  I doubt that ATI would allow such an issue to continue for that long.

As for the idea that it may be a content delivery network, I would expect that it would be one owned and operated by ATI rather than AT&T as the ATT-ACDN in the address implies.

Further, their site worked just fine for my U-Verse connection until about a month ago.  Since that time, I have tested it various times and found that U-Verse continually failed but the alternate provider I use works just fine.  It wasn't until today that I began to actually investigate the problem and found the error in the DNS lookup on the part of AT&T. 

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The ATT-ACDN more than likely is a dumb host powered by AT&T but leased by ATI. They probably have one on Comcast's network as well. It helps them offload the downloads from their own servers as well as improve the experience for the end user by keeping the source closer. 

If you put up a site through GoDaddy, they're not responsible if you did not upload all the content for your web site. If ATI is not verifying their mirror site links, it's not AT&T's fault.

Have you contacted ATI support yet?

 It's not the DNS server you use, but the IP address assigned to you by the ISP, that ATI uses to determine which mirror site they send you to for downloads.

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[skeller]

Using U-Verse, I can download the file even using my default DHCP DNS server, and using Google's 8.8.8.8.

It does seem strikingly similar to a problem I'm having (http://forums.att.com/t5/Setup-and-Self-Install/Weird-issue-connecting-to-att-idns-net/m-p/3199325), though, which leads me to wonder if AT&T has some weird routing problems that are not network-wide with their content delivery network.