Last week, Virgin Media, a very large United Kingdom ISP, fixed a configuration which was preventing some of their customers from choosing OpenDNS.

The history: last summer, we heard from various NTL customers (Virgin Media was previously known as NTL) that OpenDNS was not an option for them to use, for unknown reasons.

My thanks to Adam Ford in the Operations team at Virgin Media for reaching out with the note below, which he kindly gave me permission to post here. Our thanks, too, to those Virgin Media customers who raised the issue.

I’m impressed by the proactive steps taken by Adam and his colleagues. Giving your customers choice is good business.

The note from Virgin Media

I work in the Operations team at Virgin Media, and we’ve been made aware of an issue regarding some of our customers using DNS services off our network — and directed to your blog. This most certainly shouldn’t be the case, so we looked and corrected a configuration issue on a core router in Cambridge.

Whilst we do currently have in place DNS caching techniques in order to speed up response times for customers, this should ONLY affect traffic to our own DNS servers. (This ‘DNS caching’ method is currently being replaced.)

The configuration error meant some (not all) customers in the Cambridge area would have been forced to use our own DNS servers (transparently redirected).

One of our customers has kindly tested this for us since we made the configuration change and confirmed it is now working as expected.

Hopefully this ends the story: we always permit use of external DNS servers on our Cable/DSL services. I’d be grateful if you could update your blog to ensure customers know the up to date information (ie, it should work fine :o) ).

On behalf of Virgin Media I really do apologise for the disruption this has caused, as it should not have happened. This type of error should be near impossible in the future as mentioned above– the current system is being replaced.

Many thanks,

Adam Ford
Principal Internet Systems Engineer
Virgin Media Engineering & Operations

BroadbandReports.com tells us Comcast’s DNS servers had a rough weekend. According to reports from Comcast customers, instead of being able to surf freely they were confronted with this page when they attempted to visit any Web site:

It’s not clear if the problem continues today, but one thing is certain: OpenDNS fixed the problem.

Welcome to OpenDNS, Comcast customers!

John and Allison
(picture by David)

LaunchPad area
for first-time exhibitors

Kiosk O
for OpenDNS

For three days this week, three members of the OpenDNS team were in Santa Clara, California at ISPCON, sharing OpenDNS with a bustling group of ISPs and infrastructure vendors of all sizes.

The show operated smoothly, and we got the chance to tell lots of new folks about why OpenDNS can deliver great DNS for ISPs and their customers. Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty busy. Thursday morning was quiet, but by that time, so were we!

Launching Accounts for the conference was useful, mostly because there are some great features for ISPs and others running large networks that will be built on top of Accounts.

Many thanks to Denise Miller and the rest of the ISPCON team (The Golden Group) for running a good show and helping us out with some special requests.

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.