This post is targetted at anyone who has had difficulty or continues to have difficulty with Eircom viewing certain websites. In my case, it relates to domains registered from May of this year onwards. While you can wait a few days for Eircom to get their nameservers in gear or let them refresh, here’s a quick fix for you.

1. Open your network connections in windows, right-click on whatever connection you use for your broadband (be it wireless or ethernet) and click properties
2. In your connection properties window (which pops up), scroll down the main list of items your connection uses to find ‘Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)’
3. Under the ‘General’ tab, skip to the second box and tick the radio button for ‘Use the following DNS server addresses
4. Set your Primary DNS address to 159.134.237.6 and your Alternative DNS to 159.134.248.17. Please note that these are EIRCOM DNS server addresses
5. OK your changes in this window, and OK your changes in your network connections window and hopefully, like me, you’ll find that the sites are now appearing for you!

Bloody pain in the arse, and took me a while to find the old nameservers but at least I’ve got access to the sites I’ve needed anyway. For anyone who is interested, the current Eircom nameservers are

• 213.94.190.194
• 213.94.190.236

but they don’t seem to be refreshing all that well of late! This will impact the name servers on your machine locally, and doesn’t change any settings on your router (as the Eircom router automatically picks up the new 213* address range). You can follow this tutorial if you are not an Eircom customer and need to make local changes to your Primary / Alternative DNS anyway.

To reverse the changes, go back to your network properties screen again via the steps above, go back to your TCP/IP properties and just tick ‘Obtain a DNS server address automatically’ and you’ll be back to square one.