Or, "Or, how to get to the people at Spark who manage DNS servers."

My customer is the NZ representative for a multi-national company based in Sweden and they need continuous and reliable access to servers in that company's domain. The customer has a Spark ADSL Internet service and a Spark-supplied Huawei HG659B router.

On Wednesday (10 August) they found they could no longer connect to any services in the Swedish company's domain. The domain had been accessible for years prior to this.

Investigation showed that the default Spark DNS servers ns1.xtra.co.nz and ns2.xtra.co.nz could no longer resolve the domain. However, Google (8.8.8.8), and any other public DNS server I tried could all resolve the name OK. My 2degrees phone and broadband services also worked OK.

Further investigation showed Spark's DNS servers for corporate Internet customers defiant.netgate.net.nz and reliant.netgate.net.nz did resolve the domain.

The workaround I put in was to tell the router to use defiant.netgate.net.nz.

On Thursday (11 August) the fault appeared to have been resolved.

Today Friday, ns1.xtra.co.nz and ns2.xtra.co.nz are again not resolving the domain name.

The workaround is still in place so the customer is OK.

If anyone at Spark is listening, I can PM the domain name in question.

I should add that I did try and open a support call and was eventually put onto someone who was involved with managing Spark-hosted domains. He himself couldn't help but he was good enough to provide an email address to which I have sent the problem details and he would try and find the right person.