Windows 8.1 DNS Issue

Since upgrading to Windows 8.1, i've been having major DNS issues. On my PC, at work and on my Surface Pro.

Many other people also have the issue and have tried various things such as the following:

netsh winsock reset

or constantly having to

ipconfig /flushdns

Both of which only gave a temporary solution and would soon give me DNS errors again. I tried manual IP configurations, disabling IPV6 and trying fixed DNS such as Google or OpenDNS.

I then tried disabling the firewall for local networks and discovered I wasn't having to refresh pages very often. At all.

Opened up over 100 tabs in chrome from bookmarks, everything loaded fine. Still going fine hours later.

So, is the firewall blocking DNS requests?

It might be, for now i've opened up port 53 and will continue to watch the DNS issue as it can be extremely irritating.

The commands for anyone who wants them (run as administrator)

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="DNS Port 53" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=53
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="DNS Port 53" dir=out action=allow protocol=TCP localport=53
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="DNS Port 53" dir=in action=allow protocol=UDP localport=53
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="DNS Port 53" dir=out action=allow protocol=UDP localport=53

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