I'm trying to track down the source of my lousy Comcast service. PingPlotter is giving me lots of good info. But one problem I have seems to be DNS related. I couldn't browse, but PingPlotter happily pinged-away at the IP, so no apparent problem was logged. Can I make PingPlotter try to lookup the IP periodically or on each ping, rather than ping the IP? This way when DNS craps out, I'll know it.

Nope - Ping Plotter does its name -> IP lookup when it first starts, and then uses the IP address from then on. There is no facility in Ping Plotter to change the destination IP address that it's using without stopping and restarting the trace - which would start going to a different destination. So even if we *did* find that the IP address changed, the internals wouldn't handle the change in IP address.

This might be something that's worth looking at in the future, though, so I've logged an enhancement request for this.

- Pete

I'm heartened to know that my question made at least a shred of sense. Now, is there any creative way that I might be able to highlight DNS problems - can I infer anything from my traces? You might be able to tell that I'm a little out of my depth here...

I can't think of any creative ways to use Ping Plotter for this. I suspect that there might be other tools out there that will do DNS queries and do some kind of notification when the response is unacceptable. I don't have any recommendations for you on tools for this, however - sorry.

Thanks. I'm still glad I paid the $25 - I've learned a lot.

NvdB