Connectivity problems to google via openDNS

Tue Feb 9 23:43:16 UTC 2010

On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 09:56:23AM -0800, Jay Hennigan wrote:
> Mark wrote:
>> Hello nanog,
>>
>> Just wondering if anyone is experiencing the same problem with google  
>> and openDNS on their end or knows what's going on there with openDNS.  
>> The problem just occurred about 20 minutes ago.
>
> Don't do that then.
>
> OpenDNS is a form of censorware and almost certainly hijacking queries  
> to Google (and numerous other sites), redirecting to its own servers.

It's also got some spectacularly odd failure modes.  I was helping a
customer diagnose a problem yesterday where when they attempted to connect
to one server by name, they were reliably getting another server on the same
network.  Turned out that the DNS responses from OpenDNS (they were in a
cafe somewhere with free wireless that was using OpenDNS) were giving
slightly wrong addresses -- like the real address for example.com was
192.0.2.12, and OpenDNS was giving the response that example.com was at
192.0.2.16 (another server in the same cluster, hence the insane confusion). 
No wildcarding or recent DNS changes at our end, either -- it was just
OpenDNS screwing things up *somehow*.

"Never, ever use OpenDNS" is my recommendation.

- Matt