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.