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slimCODE, aka Martin Plante

OpenDNS - For the better and the worse

Just caught an unusual behavior with the OpenDNS name resolution. I tried to launch Desktop Tower Defense (yes, I'm still addicted, I could not let go just yet). OpenDNS told me www.handdrawngames.com wasn't reachable. After refreshing the cache, the problem persisted. They directed me to a third-party tool (DNSstuff.com) which gives a nice resume of one site's DNS status. Turns out one of the name servers gives a "No A record" while the other does return an IP. If I were using my ISP's DNS servers, it would probably give me that IP as the resolved name, even if records do not match. But OpenDNS is more severe. If records do not match, even if only one gives an IP, it fails and displays the usual "not loading" page.

I'm no DNS guru, but if I were OpenDNS, I'd see if I could not offer the user to try that IP from the "not loading" page, something like "Records seems inconsistent. Click here to try anyway".

 

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Published Thursday, April 19, 2007 4:53 AM by slimcode
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David Ulevitch said:

Martin,

Thanks for the bug report and helpful feedback.  I agree we should be able to be smarter in this case.  It's not the case that your ISP would do a better job here, just a luck of the draw kind of thing (not an excuse, just an explanation).

We certainly don't want to be perceived as "more severe" -- if anything we want to be the ones who make a DNS response be the right response, even if there is some problem elsewhere on the wire.

We're definitely moving in the direction of handling cases like this a bit better.  I'm glad you were able to use CacheCheck to help diagnose the problem though.  That's half the battle of getting smarter. :-)

April 19, 2007 10:32 AM
 

John Roberts said:

Martin, thanks for using OpenDNS.

It's a bit more complex than that, but I agree that if one nameserver is working, we should be able to resolve the domain. Noted as a specific example to test and confirm in the near future.

Cheers,

John Roberts

OpenDNS

April 19, 2007 8:37 PM
 

slimcode said:

It is awesome to see you are reading blog posts like this one. Great work guys!

April 20, 2007 12:41 PM
 

John Roberts said:

FYI, we made some adjustments a few weeks ago which improved our error-handling in situations like this.

May 22, 2007 2:56 PM

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