Never knew ISPs did this sort of slime to their paying customers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_hijacking
The hijacking can be done in two places.
1) On your home router. Then you have a fighting chance.
2) On a router somewhere in your ISPs network. They can just do it on their customer-aggregation routers, and redirect any traffic to port 53 (dns) to one of their own DNS servers. If they do it here, there is nothing you can do. Besides getting yourself another ISP. (Which I would do immediately).
Now suppose the hijacking is done on your own home router.
As you figured out, setting the DNS server manually is an option. Now you need to also figure out how to set your IP address, mask and the default gateway.
Log in to your router, when you haven't changed the settings. What is the IP address ? What is the netmask ? Write them down. Now from your PC, do a traceroute to any webserver on the Internet. What do the first 3 lines say ? Now do it again, but use the -d flag. Tracert -d
www.google.com.
The -d flag gives output without converting to domain names. It gives you IP addresses. The first IP address is the IP address of the ethernet (or WiFi) interface of your home router. Correct ? The second line should give you the IP address of the WAN interface of your ISP's access router. Usually this should be +1 or -1 to the IP address of the WAN interface of your home router. (Although it can be further away, e.g. when on cable).
There you have it.
The IP address of the WAN interface of your ISPs access router is the IP address you want to use as default gateway in your home router's static configuration. That's on the 2nd line of your tracert -d output.
If I were an ISP, and I'd do DNS hijacking, I'd do it on one of my own routers. And you wouldn't be able to do much. Maybe there are workaround involving tunnels, encryption or VPNs. But that requires you having access on some machine outside your house, and might not be trivial to do. Good luck.'
Oh, about setting static IP addresses. Yes, you need to have an IP address that never changes (or hardly ever changes). Some people think you're getting a random IP address out of a pool. That was the case 15 years ago with 56k dial-in modems. Nowadays different ISPs do it differently. I don't see any reason why an ISP would not assign a fixed IP address to a certain customer. I would do it that way. In fact, all ISPs in my country (dsl and cable) give their customers fixed IP addresses. I think I still have the same IP address that I got in 2003. True, ISPs can renumber from time to time, but usually there's little reason.
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