Warning When Using OpenDNS

[Daniel J. Luke]

On May 22, 2014, at 6:14 AM, Clemens Lang <cal at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> With OpenDNS it will probably not cause issues, but often providers do the same
> thing to their customers and return an IP address at their data center instead
> of the proper NXDOMAIN response. MacPorts then tries to find the fastest mirror
> out of a set of mirrors by selecting the server with the lowest ping response
> time. If your provider is providing the bogus DNS answers it is usually the
> fastest, gets selected and downloads fail. The OpenDNS servers are probably not
> the fastest to ping, though.

they might be (they have a bunch of 'good' anycasted locations that make them close to a lot of people), but I'm not sure how poorly they interact with macports

> Also note that you can disable this behavior in OpenDNS' control panel.

if you use OpenDNS, you should disable this (you can leave all of the other stuff enabled). In their dashboard it's Settings -> Advanced Setting -> Domain Typos -> Enable type correction (and NX Domain redirection) 

You want that turned off. For a dynamic IP connection, you then also want to enable Dynamic IP Update and install the opendns client (to make sure you keep your settings when your IP changes).

The google dns servers don't do NXDOMAIN redirection, so they're a reasonable alternative also (if there's some reason why you don't want to use your ISP's nameserver). You could also run your own local recursive caching resolver (unbound and bind9 are both available in macports).

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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