What pisses me off: DNS “miss” results pages
June 17, 2008
I switched back to my ISP’s nameservers after getting fed up with OpenDNS. I love the idea of OpenDNS and thought I would like the service a lot. Turns out that it ended up pissing me off far more than any generic service, but that rant is for another post. One thing OpenDNS does have in common with my ISP (and apparently many others), is its helpful results page served to you when a domain is not resolved.
For a varying definition of helpful, that is. According to what has been standard practice and is indeed in the DNS RFCs, when a DNS server is queried for a non-existent domain, it should return a “not found” response.
mshade@gobot:~$ ping idontexist.com
ping: unknown host idontexist.com
It’s quickly becoming common practice to instead redirect these unsuccessful queries to a landing page with search results of the keywords in the hostname or the hostname itself. What’s wrong with this? I can think of a few problems off the top of my head. Some are simply a matter of convention and expectations, while others are technical. Here is a short list:
- Standard tools break when an unresolved hostname would normally be detected, instead receiving the IP of the web proxy used to display these helpful results.
- Troubleshooting DNS problems becomes harder.
- When I enter an invalid domain, the error is obvious. I don’t want to click your search results, or have my entry auto-corrected transparently. I want to see that error.
- Modern browsers already suggest solutions to common errors when entering URLs, even suggesting addresses previously visited.
- The landing pages are usually ad-filled and contain irrelevant search results anyway.
- The internet is not only for browsers. Though the majority of traffic may be browser driven, DNS servers are supposed to be application neutral.
I’m sure there are others that I’m missing at the moment, and I’m sure there will be arguments as to the benefits of this behavior. When it comes down to it though, this just feels like yet another bastardization of the internet and another piece of useless hand-holding designed to dumb down the net and make money off ads served by users’ mistakes.
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June 17th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Dude, don’t even get me started. Im with rogers and they use SMC for there DNS gateway, and every unsuccessful query re-directs me to wsearch.net, which not only looks like a phishing website, it spawns pop ups. Its definitely not spyware (a) im on a mac and b) other people have the same issue). Heres the kicker, its only with people using the SMC router.
June 17th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
There’s settings you can fiddle with in the OpenDNS dashboard that have alleviated similar frustrations on my end. I just skimmed through and disabled anything related to ‘shortcuts’ or ‘typo correction’ and I had my wonderful “I’m feeling lucky” Firefox address bar back to normal. Some people were reporting it taking longer for the changes to take effect than others, but hopefully this will help things on your end.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Jamie,
My problems with OpenDNS don’t end there. I intend to make another post about OpenDNS specifically, but some of the issues I saw were:
- DNS cache attacks specific to OpenDNS (photobucket.com in this case)
- OpenDNS uses a proxy for Google.com, leading to one case where I was unable to access google
- Why does OpenDNS use a proxy for google.com? are they recording searches?
- And of course, the landing page for unknown domains
There are more, which is why I think another post is warranted. But thanks for mentioning the available settings, that should be useful to someone.