Help with Preference pane DNS settings for Mail

Donald P,

<208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220>

Where do you have the two DNS specified? In the 2wire router
or in the OS X Preference pane? The namebench utility says
208.67.220.220 is resolver2.opendns.com

Also, how did you specify the search domain?

Message was edited by: aRKay

Donald,

I added your two numbers to my Preference pane and already had
the gateway.2wire.com set for the search option.

I ran the namebench and it came back with pretty good score using
the resolver2.opendns.com and resolver4.opendns.com Hostnames.

For grins I added the SBC Clobal TX-2 US as the third

65.68.49.51 wgdns2.rcsntx.sbcglobal.net

For the last one I have the

192.168.1.254 that points to my 2wire router.

Going to sleep on and see how it works in the morning.

Going to sleep on and see how it works in the morning.

The problem is solved and I have checked the Yes button that my
question has been answered. The following is a copy of a posting
two days ago to the Microsoft Entourage group that should work
just as well for Mail users.

---------

If you are tied of getting the following Entourage error
message -3170 over and over again, read on.

----------------
Error:

Entourage cannot find the server. Verify the server information
entered correctly in the Account Settings, and that your DNS
settings in the Network pane of System Preferences are correct.

Explanation:

Could not retrieve mail

Error –3170
----------------

Thanks to a tip from Diane Ross I have gone two days without
getting the error message.

First, I know the Account Settings for my ATT DSL service
have been correct for some time and have not changed.

The short version of the fix that worked for was to open
the OS X 10.6.3 (Snow Leopard) System Preferences/
Network/Advanced/DNS panel and add some better Domain
Name Servers from my location.

The default (or before) OS X setting was:

DNS Servers: Search Domains:

192.168.1.254 gateway.2wire.com

Note both were dimmed. The server listed tells OS X to use
the ATT provided combo 2wire modem/router for my DSL service.

The change that seem to have worked for me was to leave the
Search Domain the same; however, I added some good servers that
bypass the 2wire gateway with its automatic DNS setting.

DNS Servers: Search Domains:

208.67.220.220 gateway.2wire.com
208.67.220.222
65.68.49.51
192.168.1.254

I found the ‘good’ or better DNS Servers by making several runs
using the free Google utility called namebench 1.2
<http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/32784/namebench>

This utility takes some time and will make suggestions from your
location. If you add the namebench recommendation and run it
again it will find a better recommendation. I had to make several
runs to find the better DNS Servers for my location. The first or
primary is called OpenDNS, the second is a backup for the OpenDNS
and the third is SBC Global TX now owned by ATT and I live in
Texas. Note I ended with the default IP address.

FYI, I tied using the selected servers in the 2wire gateway in the
manual mode rather than the default automatic mode and it just
did not work right. Some pages would not open and others were
slow. For this reason I run the router in the automatic mode for
DNS and control things using the OS X Network preference pane.

The addition of preferred DNS Servers in my Preference seems
to have slowed down and hopefully stopped Entourage 2008
version 12.2.4 -3170 error messages.

Message was edited by: aRKay