Comments on: Charter screwing with DNS

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:04:41 +0000

I don’t think open dns fixes this situation. Charter recently began prozxying all dns requests no matter which dns resolvers you specify. Quite annoying, working for a dns company grom home, this sucks.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:56:04 +0000

Embarq is doing this in Vegas. Made it a MAJOR pain in the ass searching for a server on our local network as anything you would ping would return an IP address. (figured on what was going on after a couple of minutes) This is messed up!!! All in the name of hijacking bad page requests to get more revenue from their subscribers.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Thu, 29 May 2008 06:52:06 +0000

Can someone get me the password to this email account? sonicx@charter.net
and send it to
hugdealer@hotmail.com

It’s ok if it’s impossible to thanks.

By: Blake

Blake — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:10:33 +0000

Thanks for the opendns recommendation, guys.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:07:32 +0000

Charter are not alone on this one.
TalkTalk Broadband in the UK do the same thing, we discovered this ourselves whilst trying to connect people using TalkTalk broadband onto our VPN as it totally f**ks up VPN users.
We suspected its a supposedly ‘friendly’ feature which forwards people on to TalkTalks ‘nicer’ looking helper page than your typical ‘page not found’ error in IE, as every page would be DNS redirected to the nicer one. Totally unfriendly in reality when you try to do anything out of the ordinary-
Its actually a Windows VPN client oddity – ISP DNS lookups are still performed whilst connected to the VPN (to Microsoft ISA server at least), arguably normal behaviour.
So its important for ISP DNSs to fail unresolvable lookups normally, so that they are instead failed thru to the VPN provided DNS (our internal DNS servers). That way, staff can resolve addresses internal to our network (not exposed on the internet).
Either way, without this oddity, it just wouldn’t be an issue. Typical MS really.

By: buzzkill

buzzkill — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:13:08 +0000

OpenDNS is not an automatic fix. If you get your google on, you will find that in some areas they intercept port 53 traffic and route to their own. Also, opendns is slow as hell.

By: Jonathon

Jonathon — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:01:40 +0000

I think openDNS only does that for http(s) requests. Normal stuff like your scripts should get the expected failure.

By: ralph

ralph — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:30:30 +0000

opendns ???

Thats not a solution, its just an equivalent problem. Try changing your dns lookup servers per their instructions.

Now from a command prompt try: nslookup asdf.asdf.asdf

TADA everything resolves to their servers.

Now in a browser try http://asdf.asdf.asdf

TADA you get a page with ads! YAY so much better than the EXACT same problem on charter

By: Blind

Blind — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:07:29 +0000

http://www.opendns.com/features/guide/

Since open DNS does the same thing, does it's op out work across the board or no?

By: DietFig

DietFig — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:00:59 +0000

Good call on OpenDNS, I don’t why I didn’t think of that before.

By: buzzkill

buzzkill — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:15:58 +0000

Charter “communications” sucks azz. They have been pulling this **** for quite some time in my area. And it only is worse with windows if you are trying to VPN to work because of the farked up retarded way that windows does dns resolution order. So when I am trying to resolve a machine at work, charter intercepts the farcking request and gives their dumb freakin “I think you are lost, child. Come into my gingerbread house of paid for advertisers so I can pillage your pockets” instead of simply saying, “umm .. I don’t know” so the DNS res can move on to the next interface so I can get my FREAKIN WORK DONE so I have more time to read Hack-A-Day!!!

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:39:44 +0000

I’m glad I’ve got Qwest ISP!!!

By: ivan256

ivan256 — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:21:33 +0000

@ryan, re: #2

Yeah, it’s like that, except that the root servers actually know the answer. ;)

By: Blind

Blind — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:02:52 +0000

This has come up in the past on other sites too. Verizon has been doing it for a while it seems (link below to a discussion on the matter) and Time Warner has been doing it for at least the last year. Time Warner also offers an opt out that at least works for web browsing and ping, but I haven't explored past that much really. Their response when I wrote them regarding the "broken" nature of the DNS was (as I recall) more or less "We offer an opt out, so deal with it". I'd really love to have a viable option to switch to for internet, but I'm not seeing much out there and bullshit like this is quickly getting to me.

Link to discussion on Verizon's actions.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/02/20/7806912.aspx

By: longbow486

longbow486 — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:52:58 +0000

I don’t mind Charter, since they do have one of the most open and insecure networks. I love modem hacking :-)