Last night I was greeted to a very unpleasant, and unsettling occurrence that had me baffled until today when I got some help from a great friend - one of my old co-worker buddies from Microsoft.  My network was up and everything was fine (internally), but I couldn't get any DNS resolution outside my network (i.e. out on the internet).

As it turns out I could ping my router from every computer on the network except my domain controller (which is also my DNS server).  Because my DNS server couldn't resolve anything, I was pretty dead in the water.  I tried several things to fix the issue, but nothing worked.  It was suggested by my buddy to change the server's IP address and see if I couldn't still ping the router.  Lo and behold that was the problem!

Somehow, somewhere, the router was denying traffic from my old IP address.  Without any concrete evidence, I attribute this problem to a pretty bad power outage that we had a few days ago.  Even after powering down the router for several minutes and starting it back up I could not get connectivity on the old IP so I had to resort to a new IP.  Crazy, but at least it works!

Ya know? I've been in the contemplating getting a new, good, reliable router anyway...maybe this is the incentive that I need.  This one that I have (a NetGear) has been fantastic over the past several years, but I've been wanting to get something newer and better; budget is not the primary concern - but practicality is.

Any suggestions?