DNS malfunctioning: what does it mean and what to do?

When a device reports a DNS malfunction, an alert in the form of a red triangle will be shown in the status column of the Access Points or Switches list, as depicted below. On mouse hover, the message DNS malfunctioning will pop-up.

What does it mean?

This means that the device is not able to resolve the Plasma Cloud check-in server hostname. The potential cause is that the DNS server used by the network may not be reachable or may be malfunctioning.

Plasma Cloud devices rely on the local DHCP server to obtain the DNS settings, therefore all users in the same LAN (including WiFi and wired clients) may be affected by this issue and may be unable to communicate with the Internet.

Why are Plasma Cloud devices able to report DNS outages?

In the event of a DNS outage, Plasma Cloud devices use a fallback mechanism to report the DNS failure state to the cloud, which itself does not rely on DNS. This helps to identify the nature of the network problem, otherwise there would be no knowledge about DNS causing an issue. The affected devices would simply show as offline. While DNS outages are ongoing, connected WiFi as well as wired clients are unable to resolve any DNS name.

What to do?

To solve this issue, you will have to ask your network admin to:

1. Check that the DNS settings propagated in the network via the local DHCP server point to the correct DNS servers; and
2. Verify that the DNS servers are functioning correctly.