Hey MySpace.com -- we can't reach you on 127.0.0.1

October 30, 2006

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.

$ 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

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.

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http://www.maddr.com Lane

David, Your service on this site is incredible, my internet connection has never been as responsive as the last two months and myspace is actually tolerable with the improved page display speeds. I still cannot believe its free, how on earth is OpenDNS going to support itself? Do you have some idea of a business model based on this service?
http://www.pentagon.net.au Andrew Luecke

Good find. There must have been a good (in theory) reason for it though. I hope I live to see the day when Microsoft accidentally points their DNS to Apple’s site though

I’m just wondering if it doesn’t make sense to filter dns’s pointing to 127.0.0.1, 0.0.0.0, 192.168.X.X, X.X.X.0, X.X.X.255 and 10.X.X.X. I guess it would make OpenDNS the preferred DNS for DDNS Zombies, but might speed stuff up marginally.

Also, nice system you have running. Any chance you’ll be setting up voting on webpages to allow everyone to determine if they want them blocked?

Also, here in Australia, I’ve set up our showroom with OpenDNS, our internal network with OpenDNS (with the exception of the mail server as its a security issue), and been suggesting it to all of our customers. You guys are miracle workers. My only wish is that there was an australian OpenDNS server to save us aussies from 100ms extra lag on the DNS
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Brookz

I guess they were embarassed and removed that entry since this was dugg.
http://www.jeffmccann.com Jeff McCann

I too would like to commend you on your excellent service… I’ve yet to experience anything negative with it!
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Tom

Lane,

are you working for OpenDNS or are you just stupid? The page display speed difference is almost unnoticable: so what if your first dns request gets answered 5 ms faster? The next pages you view on the same host will not get you any speed increase, as the dns lookups are served from your OS cache anyway.
http://www.opendns.com David Ulevitch

Lane,

Thanks for your kind words. The service will definitely stay free. I’ve always kept my other service, EveryDNS.Net, free too and it’s been around for five years non-stop.

OpenDNS has a lot more resources and people behind it and we’re definitely running it as a business. We make money from advertising on our search page and also from services we offer to larger corporate networks. You’ll be hearing more about those services on this blog and through our website as we open the services up to a wider audience.

Thanks!
http://turfyman.strangled.net Tom

I agree with Lane, thank you OpenDNS! The services you offer are very helpful, and are much appreciated at a price you can’t beat! I’m glad I found OpenDNS, my DNS requests have been faster for months now. Thanks again David and OpenDNS!

-Tom
Long

You guys are visionaries. I can see a LOT of potential for this service.

Considering that OpenDNS does phishing prevention I would think that the DNS query responses would have a relatively short TTL. I’m seeing query responses with TTL ranging from 18 secs up to 3 hours returned from OpenDNS. Let’s say I browse http://www.somesite.com, it gets stored in my host DNS cache with a TTL of 3 hours and within that time frame it gets classified by OpenDNS as a phishing site but since it’s already cached I’m vulnerable for the remainder of the TTL. Obviously, you don’t want the TTL to be too short so what do you think is a good balance and will you standardize on a specific TTL?

Another question, how do I put in a request to redirect all the typosquatting domains to the legitimate domain?

Thanks for the incredibly useful service!
Long

Btw, just a friendly note that your blog timestamp is off an hour.
Jessica

Perhaps your timezone is off an hour
http://infopowered.blogspot.com Vi_mail

Nice find guys. Good to keep watch on such things and add some spice to our life.
http://aboutoracle.blogspot.com OracleManiac

127.0.0.1 ? I have one of these too

Seriously, the guys at myspace should be extremely careful. One bad coincidence could lead to dis@ster!
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magnus

Looks like it is still a problem as of 15:30 (GMT-5)

; > DiG 9.3.2 > myspace.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER
http://keith.hostmatrix.org Keith

Not really that interesting….
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http://www.gamesecretary.com/blog.aspx David Mackey

Makes me feel a little bit better about my own late night mistakes.
pd

Who else was reminded of the chatlog of that “1337 h@x0r” who tried to hack 127.0.0.1 when reading this post!!
http://www.wirah.com web design uk

god MySpace tech staff are morons
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Ilgaz

Average commercial site (read: ADS) has 5-10 different hosts in their index.html , if you have a horrible service at ISP (they just compile/run Bind on worst machine) your browser will lag each different (unique host) so even if you have a E something link (!) you will lag.

DNS services are/were most overlooked services on ISPs. I don’t want to make people paranoid but if your ISP DNS (non managed) gets hacked, you will have very serious problems.
sayara kennedy

i love myspace
sara bong

ummm none of the codes work they are all blocked
mk

I have a semi related issue I need help with.

About a week ago, none of my applications would launch. I can still get online, but that’s it.

I tried to reinstall Spybot for example, but it would not because it could not connect to 127.0.0.1. I know this is a loopback to own computer.

what gives?
http://myspace.com Trisha

I am a teacher and i can’t even acess my friends on mysoace so you need to unblock it please