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Administrative: Good Bye OpenDNS.

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    • CommentAuthordallas7
    • CommentTimeJun 5th 2009
     permalink
    I've been using OpenDNS long enough to not remember how long I've been using it. As a retired IT pro (24 years; MCP; A+; Novell, Apple, Unix certs; blah blah) my friends and family depend on me to maintian a modicum of security on their PCs. In addtion to whatever anti-virus and anti-malware apps are in current acclaim, OpenDNS is one of the barriers I've depended on for my, and their, security. No more...

    1) Slow. Once a noticeable plus, OpenDNS no longer offers a speed advantage. My seat-of-the-pants experiences recently leave me with the feeling that it's actually slowing things down.

    2) Fails to resolve many URLs unless www dot is prepended to the whatever dot com.

    3) Breaks youtube. I started getting calls that my friends and relatives could not only no longer view youtube content, but at times couldn't even get to the home page as well. This is what actually got me to looking into the problems.

    I can repeatedly and predictably demonstrate these issues at will on nine different computers running XP, Vista, OSX and Linux on broadband provided by Qwest, AT&T and Cox in several neighborhoods throughout the Phoenix metroplex.

    Judging from the results of my searches and research, the perception is OpenDNS is problem free and bulletproof. It is, of course, either the user, the computer, the network, the ISP, or some of those or all of those. Be that as it may, after almost a month of trying to work around the problems, I'm going to kludge along in ignorance and denial without OpenDNS from now on. Along with my users who are all quite appreciative... "Thanks for fixing my computer."
    • CommentAuthorrotblitz
    • CommentTimeJun 5th 2009 edited
     permalink
    Interesting insights.

    "1) Slow."
    How did you measure this? "The feeling" is not really something appropriate for an IT Pro. You should be able to use better methods.

    "2) Fails to resolve many URLs unless www dot is prepended"
    I cannot confirm this, but maybe there are more people here having this issue? Let's see.

    "3) Breaks youtube."
    I cannot confirm this, but maybe there are more people here having this issue? Let's see.

    "the results of my searches and research"
    Sorry, which ones? Just "feelings"?
    Thankful People: pencoyd, Eric Gillette, maxh91, sjwalter, samj
    • CommentAuthorsjwalter
    • CommentTimeJun 5th 2009
     permalink
    I'm getting the 'slow' issues as well, but I'm wondering if that isn't a problem with my ISP instead.
  4.  permalink
    www. is unnessary and I have encountered no sites like that(*that dont load unless the www is put on.. except for those few sites that stick with www and dont have a website configured without www... which only 1 i know of like that is nasa.gov(there may be more)
  5.  permalink
    Breaks YouTube - Never had a problem myself. What is being filtered that is necessary for YouTube to connnect properly?
  6.  permalink
    Hi!

    " Fails to resolve many URLs unless www dot is prepended" <-Yes, this is true, i confirm!

    "3) Breaks youtube." <- Sometimes i have this message "This video is no longer available", when i change my DNS, it's ok, but i don't use youtube all days, so it's not important for me.
  7.  permalink
    >>Sometimes i have this message "This video is no longer available"<<

    That message comes up when, ahem, a video is no longer available.

    It happens in one of these cases:

    - The author of the video has deleted it from YouTube;

    - The author has made the video private so only his/her friends may view it;

    - The video was deleted by YouTube because of a TOS violation;

    - The video has been made temporarily unavailable because of a copyright dispute.

    There may be some other reasons, but the above is the typical reason. Whatever the reason, it has nothing to do with DNS.
  8.  permalink
    No, the DNS, and the cache can create some problems, you can read this for example: http://help.youtube.com/group/youtube-issues/browse_thread/thread/2199baed4ac0868a
  9.  permalink
    That is just somebody's opinion in that forum.

    If you had a DNS problem, you would not get that message from YouTube. You would get a message from OpenDNS.

    With DNS you either reach YouTube or you do not. And if you do not, YouTube has no way of knowing that.

    Additionally, with a DNS problem (or blocking) you would see no videos at all. That happens when ytimg.com is blocked.
    Thankful People: Eric Gillette, rotblitz, sjwalter
    • CommentAuthorfalcon4
    • CommentTimeJun 7th 2009 edited
     permalink
    (I just realized, this would be a better new topic than a reply... sorry!)
  11.  permalink
    Yes, but it doesn't solve my problem: When i use the DNS of my isp, youtube is ok, but, when i use opendns some videos switch to the status "no longer available" ...
    • CommentAuthorrotblitz
    • CommentTimeJun 7th 2009
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    @luckylucky
    Do you want to analyze this? We may be able to give related instructions to be performed, if you are patient enough.
    • CommentAuthorlatenite4
    • CommentTimeJun 7th 2009
     permalink
    Yesterday, I was able to access youtube.com , yahoo.com, and gmail.com. This
    morning I could not access any of these sites. I had not changed my filter settings. I tried explicitly allowing these sites on my dashboard and waiting
    3 minutes; still cannot access these sites.

    Rod
    McKinney, TX
  14.  permalink
    @rotblitz
    Thanks, but it's not really a problem for me, i use youtube average once a month, so it's ok ;-)
    • CommentAuthorrotblitz
    • CommentTimeJun 7th 2009
     permalink
    @latenite4
    Are you saying that the sites are blocked by OpenDNS, i.e. are you landing at block.opendns.com then in these cases? If not, they are not blocked by OpenDNS, and therefore whitelisting them is nonsense.
  16.  permalink
    don't leave me my friend
  17.  permalink
    @ lentu_mbaleg

    What? No, we won't abandon you. Just start a new thread with your comments or request for assistance with respect to OpenDNS.
    • CommentAuthorbencloud
    • CommentTimeJun 16th 2009
     permalink
    "I've been using OpenDNS long enough to not remember how long I've been using it. As a retired IT pro (24 years; MCP; A+; Novell, Apple, Unix certs; blah blah) my friends and family depend on me to maintian a modicum of security on their PCs. In addtion to whatever anti-virus and anti-malware apps are in current acclaim, OpenDNS is one of the barriers I've depended on for my, and their, security. No more..."

    I'm a 19 year old IT student and everything you listed is quite a jump for 24 professional years of experience against my amature 2.

    Speed? Ping OpenDNS's ip at 208.67.222.222 from your friends computer.

    Here at my home I have an CISCO ASA 5505, and here's the almost instant ping:

    Type escape sequence to abort.
    Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 208.67.222.222, timeout is 2 seconds:
    !!!!!
    Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 30/30/30 ms

    If you have any longer than ~100ms it's a problem with the ISP or something is causing trouble LAN side. I remember I had something strange with my local server that caused me to have >1000ms ping times, but once I resolved that issue I'm down to ~30ms

    Fails to resolve without www.? As a disclaimer I have ISC Bind running as a Caching DNS server, but it still forwards to OpenDNS. How did I get to opendns today? I typed in opendns.com. While my accound bencloud may be new, I've been using OpenDNS for about a year and I haven't typed in www. once.

    Breaks youtube? Again, something must be wrong with the ISP or it's LAN side. As a college student with too much time on my hands, I watch all sorts of videos on youtube and the only times I have any trouble viewing a video is when it was removed by the user or youtube itself.

    Now I don't mean to bash you, because you've retired from the position that I hope to aspire to, but I really think that you could have helped your friends/family troubleshoot the issue more. Perhapse the ISP is intercepting port 53 traffic and redirecting it to their own domain servers? I can't be sure because I don't have access to their networks to trouble shoot, but I think that OpenDNS is such a powerful free tool that I wouldn't want my friends to miss out it.

    I say all of this going only on what you typed. I'd love to hear what your troubleshooting methods were to narrow it down to OpenDNS.
    Thankful People: Eric Gillette, Tim Burke, rotblitz, jamie198402, sjwalter
    • CommentAuthorGuy
    • CommentTimeJun 16th 2009
     permalink
    I have never typed www. before any of my addresses. Only on a few occasions has it been a problem, but that is the web site and not OpenDNS.
    Also, I have used YouTube quite a bit and never had a problem. You might want to check to make sure that what of the "sub-sites" isn't blocked.
    GRC has a nice program called DNS Benchmark, which can be found at http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm , and it tests the speed of various different DNS and when I run the test, OpenDNS almost always is in the top ten.
    Thankful People: rotblitz, sjwalter
    • CommentAuthormnordhoff
    • CommentTimeJun 16th 2009 edited
     permalink
    The YouTube problems could be possible. If YouTube's DNS servers do geographic load-balancing, you might have a better connection to the servers given by your ISP's DNS.

    Wow, that sentence overused "servers". Still made some sense, though.
    • CommentAuthorbencloud
    • CommentTimeJun 16th 2009
     permalink
    @ mnordhoff

    OpenDNS wouldn't have any baring on geographic ip location. It seems that it's a pretty common misconception that DNS has anything to do with people's connection speed or ip address. I can be in hong kong and use OpenDNS's US servers, but my ip address that google sees is still from hong kong. DNS is like a phone book, you look up the person's number in the phone book, but when you actually call them, their caller id displays YOUR phone number, not the phonebook company's.
    Thankful People: Eric Gillette
    • CommentAuthorrotblitz
    • CommentTimeJun 16th 2009 edited
     permalink
    @bencloud
    Actually, you are not right. Some (or still many?) worldwide website hosters/owners do not use Anycast (which they should) or not Anycast alone, but return different IP addresses depending on where the related *DNS server* is located. (Or to stay with your phone book example: for the same participant phone books in different areas of the world list different phone numbers.) Or better, they feed DNS lookup services in different parts of the world with different IP addresses. So if your DNS service is far away, you get connected to the more distant website, which is closer to the DNS service. However, you are right, they are seeing your IP address (on their more distant server), with no consequence.

    "I can be in hong kong and use OpenDNS's US servers, but my ip address that google sees is still from hong kong"
    Ha, yes, they wonder at Google US, why a Hong Kong user connected to their US server, although they have one in Hong Kong. But it doesn't help, just to the contrary...

    The trick with reaching the nearest site can only function by using Anycast, as there is then only one IP address world-wide. OpenDNS itself is a good example for an Anycast site. They can be reached world-wide under the same DNS server addresses, but you are routed to their closest server location. Of course, if you are located outside North America and Europe, you may be out of luck then. There is no server location near by.
    Thankful People: infinity306
    • CommentAuthorgareth48
    • CommentTimeJun 18th 2009 edited
     permalink
    As far as YouTube goes OpenDNS appears to have broken mine. I can access the site but I cannot play any of the videos. It throws an error stating: "An error occurred, please try again later." Well, so much for YouTube. I didn't use it all that much but it would be nice to have if and when I wanted to use it.

    _________________________________________________________________________________

    Well, I performed some experiments and found that if you set your OpenDNS to Moderate you can then view the YouTube videos. Evidently, when set to High that is what's causing the problem. So, I guess one can switch back and forth if necessary. If one really doesn't care all that much about YouTube than keep your setting on High and don't worry about it. The only remaining problem that I can see it how to filter out porn videos on YouTube but I guess that's for another day.
  24.  permalink
    best to check the categories you want to block instead of using the predefined sets....
    If I recall correctly high includes advertising which would block s.ytimg.com which would end up blocking all the videos..since it is approved for advertising for some strange reason now..
  25.  permalink
    Ok so advertising isnt in High.. not sure what is causing your problem.. you can try whitelisting s.ytimg.com and ytimg.com..(Why both?, because s.ytimg.com is a cname and ytimg.com doesn't cover it,actually you might even need to whitelist static.cache.l.google.com instead to whitelist it..
    • CommentAuthorrotblitz
    • CommentTimeJun 18th 2009 edited
     permalink
    @gareth48
    Déjà vu: http://forums.opendns.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=3940#Item_8

    @infinity306
    "Why both?, because s.ytimg.com is a cname and ytimg.com doesn't cover it..."
    According to my experience this is not how the whitelist and blacklist work. There is a simple match from right to left only and is not related to DNS. So I would think ytimg.com covering every "subdomain".
    A good example to prove this not being DNS related: just enter "org" and "net" into the "always block" list and wait 3 minutes - you will be shocked. :shocked:
    •  
      CommentAuthormmirenzi
    • CommentTimeJun 18th 2009
     permalink
    Administrator
    FYI - relating to the Youtube issue:

    Many sites like YouTube are hosted on large load-balanced systems, with multiple IP addresses. They will often decide, at the DNS level, to split traffic up among systems by handing back different IP addresses.

    It looks like YouTube was instructing OpenDNS to send users to a group of servers that were experiencing network issues. Switching back to your ISPs DNS servers "fixed" the problem because YouTube was telling them to send you to another location not having issues (note that there are probably cases you don't notice where the opposite is true).

    Ultimately this is an issue between one of YouTube's locations and your ISP. We have no visibility into the quality of the connection between your ISP and any given site, so we can only direct you to the IP address the site owner tells us to send you to.

    (source: http://forums.opendns.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=3339&page=1 )
    Thankful People: Eric Gillette, maintenance
  28.  permalink
    @rotblitz
    I tested it.. blacklisted ytimg.com and going to ytimg.com popped up the block page, but s.ytimg.com resolved to the google error page saying that the requested URL / couldnt be found..

    so apparently from my testing it seems that cnames don't work the same way for some reason..
    right now i have ytimg.com blacklisted..
    see the below NSlookup results, most cases it does work from Right to left, but apparently not with Cnames...apparently as soon as s.ytimg.com is passed to opendns it doesnt check and see that ytimg.com is blacklisted, but instead checks static.cache.l.google.com

    Server: resolver1.opendns.com
    Address: 208.67.222.222

    Name: ytimg.com
    Address: 208.69.32.132

    Server: resolver1.opendns.com
    Address: 208.67.222.222

    Name: static.cache.l.google.com
    Address: 209.85.239.29
    Aliases: s.ytimg.com
    Thankful People: rotblitz, Red Prince, maintenance
    • CommentAuthorrotblitz
    • CommentTimeJun 18th 2009
     permalink
    @infinity306
    Yes, you have convinced me. Thanks a lot for pointing this out. :smile:
    It's the second time I fail because of those aliases. Some day I wondered how many things are blocked in the stats. After extensive researches and with the help of OpenDNS we found out that it is because I block 2o7.net. Actually, this block did and does not cause any harm, but it was confusing to see how many (unnecessary) stuff is marked as blocked then in the stats.
    Doing an nslookup or even better a reverse lookup shows the true reason behind such weird phenomenons.

    But one thing I want to point out: there is no (generic) domain ytimg.com.
    208.69.32.132 is hit-nxdomain.opendns.com. :wink:
    Apparently there are only third or higher level subdomains...

    So, in fact the right list for whitelisting or blacklisting YouTube would be:
    youtube.com
    googlevideo.com
    ytimg.com
    s.ytimg.com
    Thankful People: maintenance
  30.  permalink
    hmm you're right... weird I was sure I was getting the block page when i was trying to go to ytimg.com yesterday, and didnt check to make sure that ip was the block page or not, just knew it was an opendns page..
    so maybe for some reason I didn't actually have it blacklisted. although I have flushed cache on both my computer and the microsoft dns server that is forwarding to opendns. so maybe you can't actually blacklist pages that dont have an A record.. weird..
    • CommentAuthorrotblitz
    • CommentTimeJun 19th 2009
     permalink
    I believe it doesn't matter. Theoretical example: If you lookup sub1.ytimg.com, then OpenDNS checks your exception list (white or black), and according to the right to left matching algorithm, this may be recognized nevertheless - unless the real name for sub1.ytimg.com is landing again somewhere else, e.g. at any.thing.l.google.com...
  32.  permalink
    Ok tried adding the ytimg.com again, and now they are all going to the block page, weird did Opendns possibly change something for dealing with cnames?
    they all return 208.69.32.131 in nslookup..
    • CommentAuthorrotblitz
    • CommentTimeJun 19th 2009
     permalink
    ...which is hit-block.opendns.com. This is what one would expect. :cool:
  34.  permalink
    yep, not sure why it was apparently working differently yesterday with the block.. DNS cache shouldn't have affected a nslookup pointing directly to opendns server..
    • CommentAuthorthecroztm
    • CommentTimeJun 21st 2009
     permalink
    I was accessing OpenDNS via my router. And when I pinged OpenDNS, it took >300-400ms. Yet when I disabled OpenDNS and went through AT&T's DNS it only took ~17ms. I assume that AT&T is somehow slowing down OpenDNS because they are without scruples, ethics or conscience. But until someone can help me work around their thwarting efforts, I must also abandon OpenDNS. Any thoughts? :sad:
    • CommentAuthorrotblitz
    • CommentTimeJun 21st 2009
     permalink
    @thecroztm
    Where are you located? Also, can you post the output of the following commands here:
    tracert resolver1.opendns.com
    tracert resolver2.opendns.com
    • CommentAuthorinfinity306
    • CommentTimeJun 21st 2009 edited
     permalink
    where are you located? AT&T is providing our DSL service here at work and have no problem using Opendns servers..
    also resolver1.opendns.com and resolver2.opendns.com might be better 1's to ping..
  38.  permalink
    I just have to add, that if you need to ping to be able to tell the difference, how much can it matter? :tongue::wink:

    But seriously, try the above suggestions. Actually, I'd tracert a different site altogether, once using your ISP's nameservers, and once using OpenDNS nameservers.
    • CommentAuthorbonavista
    • CommentTimeJun 23rd 2009
     permalink
    OK...I have been having this issue off an on for the last week and now it is also effecting yahoo.com
    I have and use a static IP so Cache from someone else is ruled out.

    I have both Yahoo & Facebook white listed so theoretically that is ruled out.

    I have added various and sundry sub domains to the white list to the point that I am no longer allowed any more

    I mean COME ON.

    I have been an advocate of OpenDNS since nearly it's beginning and altho I will continue to use it at home if this random blocking of sites is not addressed soon I will have to pull it from my work and other networks I support.
    • CommentAuthorrotblitz
    • CommentTimeJun 23rd 2009
     permalink
    • CommentAuthorsjwalter
    • CommentTimeJun 23rd 2009
     permalink
    I'm not seeing the problem.

    'Slow' was an issue for me....but it seems to have gone away.

    OpenDNS is always in the top 5 of DNS servers if you run a test.
    • CommentAuthorstarchip
    • CommentTimeJun 24th 2009
     permalink
    Just swapped to OpenDNS from stock Comcast and I am seeing a speed decrease of over half. Changed DNS entries back and speed returns.
    Somthing is not right.
  43.  permalink
    @ starchip
    How long does an OpenDNS lookup take vs a Comcast lookup?
    Thankful People: Eric
    • CommentAuthoralexhir
    • CommentTimeJun 25th 2009
     permalink
    Well, I have used OpenDNS for a very long time as well, I've used it in 3 different countries including USA, Brazil, and Venezuela.

    OpenDNS has incresed the speed REMARKABLY especially in Brazil and Venezuela, only yesterday I "installed" it on my parents computer in Venezuela, and they are amazed on how much it has improved their internet experience. ( they use Facebook 24/7 )

    Regarding the "www" issue, yes, I have notice this with 1 or 2 sites, but aside from that I have no problem what so ever.

    Thank you OpenDNS, keep the good job.
    Alex H.

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