Sometimes, when it's late at night in the office, we notice odd things in the DNS that don't belong. Sometimes they're worthy of a blog mention. Tonight we highlight a myspace.com DNS misconfiguration.

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$ host -vv myspace.com
Trying "myspace.com"
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 24145
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;myspace.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.51
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.50
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.49
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.48
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 127.0.0.1

Received 109 bytes from 208.67.222.222#53 in 9 ms

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For those of you who don't know, 127.0.0.1 is another way of saying localhost which is another way of saying your computer. So while that may literally take me to My Space (as in, my personal computer), it is certainly not going to get me to the website myspace.com. Whoops.

We’ve reached a (late) decision, but the verdict is in: we’ll be exhibiting at ISPCON in San Jose, CA, USA on November 7 – 9. As of now, the team in attendance will be David Ulevitch, John Roberts and myself (Allison Rhodes). Why will we be at a conference for ISPs? Visit our Web site on November 7 to find out.

We’d love to meet all of you, so please don’t be shy. If you’re going to the show, drop by kiosk “O” (remember O for OpenDNS) and say hello. We’ll be in the LaunchPad area [PDF of floorplan] next to the Segway Raceway (No, that’s not a typo). We have a few extra Exhibit and Events passes for those of you not planning to go now, but would if the entrance fee were waived. Let us know if you’re interested.

And if you work for an ISP, or are a member of the press (that includes you, bloggers) we’d really love to set up a meeting time in advance – time flies at conferences and we want to make sure we don’t miss each other. Please e-mail contact at opendns dot com and let us know when you have time to chat.

While I’ve publicly speculated before, I now have official confirmation from Hughes that HughesNet customers cannot use OpenDNS — or any other alternate DNS service — at this time.

In HughesNet’s terms:

Every remote [computer] uses the HughesNet turbo page servers, which only use HughesNet DNS.

The “turbo page servers” are the proxy which HughesNet uses to limit the latency imposed by satellite connnections.

There is one workaround, but it doesn’t sound like an improvement, and no one (not Hughes, not me) recommends it. Still…for curious technical folks, you may choose to not use the HughesNet turbo page servers. If you do that, then you may use an alternate DNS provider, including OpenDNS. However, given the latency of satellite broadband, I can’t imagine that faster DNS will counteract slower download speeds, as much as I might hope it would.

I don’t have official answers/confirmation from other satellite ISPs, but I expect the story is similar.

When it rains it pours. In a good way.

Heading back into the office this morning, we immediately noticed a drastic increase in support and contact e-mails. We soon figured out why, and we are definitely not complaining.

Two of the longest-running and biggest-circulation American technology magazines, PC Magazine and PC World, each distinguished OpenDNS in their respective November issues. Kyle Monson at PC Magazine included OpenDNS in his roundup of “The Most Amazing Sites of 2006.” (Online version is different from print version, but you get the gist.) And Steve Bass called OpenDNS one of his “all-time favorite cheap system speedup tips” in his November “Hassle-free PC” column. I hear lots of people say no one reads print anymore, but I’ve learned that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I know there are lots of you who found us because of Kyle and Steve’s mentions. I speak for the whole team when I say welcome to the service.

PS – To answer the No. 1 question we heard from you, yes, you can use OpenDNS if you have a router not represented in our instructions, or don’t have a router at all. Our instructions are simply to help you find where to change your DNS settings. Check out our general router instructions, or use our single-computer instructions for Mac or Windows to change DNS settings on your computer.

A brief note to say thank you to the several individuals who responded to our request for help on router instructions. We’re using the many useful emails and comments we got to cover the requested D-Link and Actiontec routers. We don’t need any more assistance with those models, at least.

We’ve also been entranced by the very well done emulators on the D-Link site: helpful to us and (I’m sure) to their customers.

Update: We’ve gotten great response from D-Link and Actiontec customers. No need to send anymore. Still waiting on confirmation about Blackberry.

We realize there are lots of popular (and not-so-popular) routers and modems we don’t have instructions for on our site. But it’s hard writing instructions for a device you don’t have in front of you. That’s why we’re calling on you to help us build out our Get Started library. At the top of our wish list are instructions for these models:

* D-Link DGL-4300
* D-Link DI-604
* Actiontec GT701
* Actiontec GT704

Inititally we thought we could write instructions based on user manuals. We found the manuals, but they didn’t provide enough information to teach others how to change DNS settings.

This just in: For Verizon users and others, we added instructions for the very popular Westell 327w today.

If you are so kind as to help us (and other OpenDNS users who share in your router or modem taste) out with instructions, please send a few bulleted steps based on any of the instructions we already have. Screenshots to accompany the steps would be great, too. Anyone who sends in accurate instructions will get a shout-out on our Web site and will forever be known as the helpful author of the [insert your router/modem model here] instructions.

Don’t worry about perfection. At this point anything will help us. And, of course, it’s our job to polish up the instructions and make them look pretty for the site.

There is also the possibility that some routers/modems don’t allow users to change DNS settings. That information is as helpful, if not more, than instructions.

Just send an e-mail with the instructions and screenshots, or other feedback, to contact at opendns dot com.

Oh, and if you have a Blackberry and can verify that these instructions work, we’d really appreciate it.

1. Go to Start->Network Connections->Show All Connections
2. Right-click your BlackBerry Internet icon, select Properties.
3. A window will open. Click the Server Types tab.
4. Click TCP/IP Settings.
5. Select “Use the following DNS server addresses:”
6. Enter 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

I’ll be in St. Louis, MO for the beginning of next week and would love to meet up with some of you.

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I will be attending NANOG 38. NANOG is the North American Network Operators Group and is a great place to stay current with cool stuff in the systems, networking and operations fields. The meeting also coincides with ARIN‘s meeting. ARIN, if you don’t already know, is the group that manages IP address allocations and assignments for North America. It manages the policy that its members (ISPs and networks mostly) fall under when requesting and managing IP space. It’s a great group that masterfully handles what seems like an easy task but is actually quite complicated.

If you want to try and meet while I’m in town just shoot me an email or reply below. I’ll be staying at the Knight Center at my Alma Mater, Washington University in St. Louis (also a NANOG sponsor). It’s not far from where the conference is and it keeps me near Clayton and University City, two of my favorite St. Louis neighborhoods.

PhishTank is alive, and filling up.

PhishTank is a community anti-phishing Web site where anyone can go to submit suspected phishes, track the status of their submissions and help verify others’ submissions. Unlike other anti-phishing efforts that may come to mind, PhishTank is totally free to use and open to access.

After a qualified number of users collectively agree that a suspected phish is, in fact, a real phish, the phish becomes verified. (Amit drew the Digg parallel.)

But we didn’t stop there. Because we genuinely want to stop phishing and believe firmly that phishing data should not cost money, PhishTank has a free and open API. Our hope is that developers will use PhishTank data to build anti-phishing elements into their tools.

And you’ve probably guessed by now how OpenDNS uses PhishTank data. Once the PhishTank community collectively verifies a phish, we conduct an additional layer of checks and balances and ultimately block the phish for OpenDNS users (if the users have phishing protection enabled, of course). We still get phishing data from other sources, too, but we think you’re going to help make PhishTank our best source.

We want OpenDNS to be the best it can possibly be, and in order for that to happen we need the best phishing data available. But we’re not selfish — the data belongs to all of us.

Read more about PhishTank here and let us know what you think!