Can't get 3rd party DNS working

[bo33b]

Has anyone ever heard of a home router blocking DNS queries and/or responses?

Many home routers run a DNS proxy, such that the DNS servers can be configured on the router and the router then passes it's own IP as the primary DNS to DHCP clients....but have you heard of a router which foces clients to go through it's proxy, such that DNS queries sent from a client to a 3rd pary DNS server never make it out to the internet?

What about DNS blocking by an ISP? Have you heard of an ISP which has configured it's switches to drop DNS traffic that isn't traveling through their own DNS servers?

My LAN clients can only query my ISP's DNS servers. Using any other means of performing a DNS lookup simply fails. What could it be?

 

[Ralston18]

Some questions that might help generate some responses:

Who is your ISP?

What router are you using?

What results do you get when you use the "ipconfig /all" all command?

What results do you get using "ping", "tracert", and "pathping"? Use both IP addresses and URL's. Use google as the target site to start with.

Thanks.

 

[bo33b]

Thanks for the input Ralston. Actually my original post was much, much longer and it sat for a few days so I trimmed it because I figured it was tl;dr 😉 I kept playing around with settings and eventually solved the problem.

I am visiting Ukraine. My ISP is Kyivstar. The router is a TP-Link TL-WR741ND provided by them, with their name on it, and some features disabled in the interface versus the "standard" router firmware simulated here: http://www.tp-link.com/resources/simulator/wr741N%28UN%29_4.2/index.htm

It turned out that was the issue. The router prohibited using custom DNS servers in its settings, and blocked DNS queries to 3rd party servers from LAN clients. Using the simulator linked above, I uncovered a way to access the firmware upgrade page and flashed an official TP-Link firmware. DNS works as expected now.