Symantec started their own domain name resolution service back in 2010 called it Norton ConnectSafe. In the beginning they offered only one pair of DNS servers for everyone to use. But in later years, they had been offering to three pair of DNS servers – Norton ConnectSafe A (for filtering risky websites such as malware sites, phishing sites etc), Norton ConnectSafe B (for filtering insecure websites and inappropriate websites), and Norton ConnectSafe C (for filtering all inappropriate content, insecure sites and more).
Unfortunately, Symantec has decided to shutdown these public DNS servers and now if you visit their website, they display a notice regarding the retirement of the Norton ConnectSafe. According to this notice, Symantec will stop the ConnectSafe servers on 15th November 2018. After that, the ConnectSafe servers will no longer respond to any DNS resolution requests.
If you have been using Norton ConnectSafe, then you should quickly switch over to some other reliable DNS servers such as OpenDNS, Google DNS or Cloudflare. If you fail to change the DNS servers before 16th November 2018, your web browser may not be able to resolve the website addresses correctly.
If you are a Windows PC user, you can use our Public DNS Server tool to quickly change the DNS servers in just 2 seconds. For this, you can download https://www.trishtech.com/downloads/public_dns.zip and extract its contents to a folder. After this, launch PublicDNS.exe, select your network interface (if unsure, tick Select All), select a pair of reliable DNS servers (such as Google DNS, OpenDNS or Cloudflare) and finally click on the Change button.
If you do not want to use this tool, then there are many other ways to change these settings. One way is to launch use new Windows 10 settings (Win+I), another is through tradition Control Panel (launch ncpa.cpl), and then there is PowerShell method:
- Press Win+X and choosing Windows PowerShell (Admin).
- Type Get-DNSClient to see a list of all the network interfaces. Note down the Interface Index for the interface you use to connect to the Internet. In my case, I use Wi-Fi and its index is 11.
- Type Set-DNSClientServerAddress -InterfaceIndex 11 -ServerAddresses(“8.8.8.8″,”8.8.4.4”) to change the DNS servers. Of course, change the interface index from 11 to the one you found out in step 2. You may also change the server addresses to any others such as “1.1.1.1”, “1.0.0.1”.
Using all these different ways, you can switch over to any other public DNS server as soon as possible, because after Norton ConnectSafe stops working, you may experience web browser troubles if you fail to change your DNS servers.