This is my first blog post here at OpenDNS, though some of you may know me from answering your support emails. It is not unusual, however, for our own users to sit in the tech support seat themselves and offer help to others. Yesterday we received the following email, and I thought it was so good we should share it:

I’ve been studying abroad in the UK for three weeks and dealing with a crummy internet connection, but at least I had OpenDNS configured on my machine. This morning, the internet stopped working for everyone in the hotel… except me. It took me a bit to realize what had happened. Once I realized the Hotel’s ISP’s DNS was down, I spent the entire afternoon configuring OpenDNS on the laptops of everyone in the hotel lobby……we have to thank you for re-connecting us to the world, even across the pond!

Thanks for such an incredible service that anyone who understands networking would pay precious money for, yet you somehow provide it for free. It’s great to be immune to one of the most annoying internet problems you can have.

- Dominic

Thanks Dominic! While we are always happy to help, it is also nice when our users take the initiative to spread the word of OpenDNS and contribute positively to their community. After all, that is one of the ideas OpenDNS was founded upon.

(My thanks to Fabio Calvigioni (oRi0n) for translating this post into Italian, below.)

Update: Several commenters say the problem is gone, and that appears to be true. We hope it will continue. - July 23, 2007

We care about delivering a great Internet experience worldwide, and it appears that many Italians are poorly served by their current DNS infrastructure.

Several times over the last several months, Telecom Italia has blocked DNS requests from OpenDNS servers. What happens? Our customers in Italy are unable to resolve domains that uses Telecom Italia for their authoritative DNS, for example: pf.rossoalice.virgilio.it (a large Italian ISP).

For months, we’ve jumped through technical hoops to work around these blocks, even though all we’re doing is what any recursive DNS service would do: ask for the location of a domain from the respective authoritative server.

We’ve communicated through several channels: email, IRC, telephone. (We don’t speak Italian, but we’ve made an effort through translation services.)

Result? Nothing. (In DNS land, we’d call it a SERVFAIL.)

If anyone responsible and responsive at Telecom Italia wants to help us resolve this matter, we’re more than willing to work this out directly.

For all those Italian customers who have been affected now and again, we apologize. We are still trying to resolve this problem via normal channels. But we’ve been quite patient so far, and we’re a bit tired of banging our heads against this particular wall.

Here’s why we’re naming Telecom Italia.

First, dnsti.interbusiness.it and dnsts.interbusiness.it have blocked our requests.
Second, the interbusiness.it domain is owned by Telecom Italia, according to whois data.

Domain:             interbusiness.it
Status:             ACTIVE
Created:            1996-01-29 00:00:00
Last Update:        2007-01-30 00:36:13
Expire Date:        2008-01-29

Registrant
  Name:             Telecom Italia S.p.A.
  ContactID:        TELE616-ITNIC
  Address:          Via Paolo Di Dono, 44
                       Roma
                       00143
                       RM
                       IT
  Created:          2007-03-01 10:44:12
  Last Update:      2007-03-01 10:44:12

Nameservers
  dnsti.interbusiness.it
  dns.opb.interbusiness.it
  dns3.nic.it
  dnsts.interbusiness.it

I look forward to sharing a solution.

Telecom Italia non risponde ad OpenDNS

OpenDNS si impegna per fornire in tutto il mondo il miglior servizio agli utenti di Internet, ma sembra che molti italiani debbano fare i conti con un’infrastruttura DNS molto carente.

Per diverse volte negli ultimi mesi Telecom Italia ha bloccato richieste DNS dai server OpenDNS. Cosa succede quindi? Molti nostri clienti in Italia non riescono a risolvere nomi di domini che usano Telecom Italia come server DNS autoritativi. Per esempio, pf.rossoalice.virgilio.it (un importante ISP italiano) viene risolto in maniera errata.

Per mesi abbiamo utilizzato espedienti tecnici per aggirare questi blocchi, anche se tutto quello che stiamo facendo è quello che farebbe ogni servizio di DNS ricorsivo: richiedere l’indirizzo di un dominio al suo rispettivo server autoritativo.

Abbiamo provato a contattare Telecom Italia per email, IRC e telefono (non parliamo italiano ma abbiamo fatto dei tentativi utilizzando dei servizi di traduzione).

Risultato: nessuna risposta (nel campo dei DNS lo chiamiamo SERVFAIL).

Se qualche responsabile o addetto di Telecom Italia è interessato ad aiutarci a risolvere questo problema saremmo dispostissimi a collaborare direttamente in tale senso.

Chiediamo scusa a tutti i clienti italiani che hanno riscontrato e stanno ancora riscontrando questo problema. Stiamo ancora provando ad eliminare il blocco attraverso i normali canali. Fin qui siamo stati abbastanza pazienti ma ora siamo un po’ stanchi di doverci scervellare con questo problema.

Ecco perché crediamo che Telecom Italia sia la causa del problema.

Innanzitutto, dnsti.interbusiness.it e dnsts.interbusiness.it hanno bloccato le nostre richieste. Inoltre, il dominio interbusiness.it, secondo i dati del whois, appartiene a Telecom Italia.

Domain:             interbusiness.it
Status:             ACTIVE
Created:            1996-01-29 00:00:00
Last Update:        2007-01-30 00:36:13
Expire Date:        2008-01-29

Registrant
  Name:             Telecom Italia S.p.A.
  ContactID:        TELE616-ITNIC
  Address:          Via Paolo Di Dono, 44
                       Roma
                       00143
                       RM
                       IT
  Created:          2007-03-01 10:44:12
  Last Update:      2007-03-01 10:44:12

Nameservers
  dnsti.interbusiness.it
  dns.opb.interbusiness.it
  dns3.nic.it
  dnsts.interbusiness.it

Spero di aggiornarvi presto con una soluzione.

There’s no reason anyone should have to deal with flaky DNS. The students at Brown University went without Internet connectivity for 3 hours (!) yesterday because their DNS was less than reliable.

Brown University, if you can hear us: use OpenDNS!

It’s been a long time coming, but we are now online and operational in London! We actually turned up our routing announcements about two days ago but I wanted to hold off on the blog post to make sure everything was stable. Some folks in the forums noticed we were online and beat me to the announcement.

I’ve been using a server in Amsterdam, hosted by my friend Peter, to test how latency changed when London came online. It should be obvious, but the results are very good and show just how important it is for us to be online in Europe.

From Amsterdam to OpenDNS before London goes online:
bash$ ping 208.67.222.222
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=0 ttl=57 time=145.077 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=152.962 ms
From Amsterdam to OpenDNS after London goes online:
bash$ ping 208.67.222.222
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=9.814 ms
64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=9.528 ms

The ping test above is a measurement of how long it takes one “packet” of Internet data to reach another host on the Internet. Bringing London online dramatically increases our reliability, speed and performance for our European users. Additionally, it decreases load in New York and Washington DC providing a win for our users in the US as well. Finally, the more sites we have, the more reliable our network becomes and that is a win for everyone.

We are online in London thanks to the efforts of a few really superb technologists and friends. I’d like to thank James Rice for his on-site help as well as his excellent guidance and advice along with Nick Waterman who fixed a minor issue we were having with our IBM BladeCenter chassis. Nick did this on December 29th, when he could have been at home with family or out partying; we really appreciate it Nick. James and Nick run Jump Networks, a high-quality, technically-savvy service provider in London.

I’d also like to give a big thanks to Chris Orme and Philip Baker from Datahop, a metropolitan fiber network in London which provides all kinds of really convenient network services. Chris worked tirelessly to make sure we could be online with our transit provider, NTT Europe in a timely fashion. It’s hard work getting folks to do things during the holidays and Chris made sure it happened. Even more impressive, Philip spent time late at night with our routers and switches making sure they were in good shape to turn up a BGP session with NTT Europe. James, Nick, Chris and Philip all went way above and beyond the call of duty and we appreciate it. I highly recommend both Jump and Datahop to anyone looking for transit and colo in London. Thanks guys!

We’re proud to be in London and look forward to peering with networks currently connected to LoNAP, a growing peering point in London. We are also considering a peering session at LINX, one of the largest exchange points in the world.

Happy New Year from everyone here at OpenDNS and we’ll see you in 2007!

We get lots of email, everyday, from our customers. Most of the emails are similar in topic - someone asking how to use OpenDNS with their setup. But every once in a while an email comes through that’s so touching we pass it around the office. The below note from Caio, a customer in Brazil, is that kind of email.

He wrote us not because he had a problem, but rather just to say thanks, for saving his job.

It’s this sort of reinforcement that makes me love what I do. We all need the Internet and I get to work with a team that makes it more reliable — saving people time, frustration and in this case, their job.

Caio gave me permission to share his email.

To: contact@opendns.com
From: caio@xxxxx.com
Subject: Thank you


Hello,

I’m just happy that I found a free service like this on the Internet.

I live in Brazil and sometimes my default DNS fails, then I can’t connect to the Internet. I’m a trainee and I work in a hardware store and my job is half in the office and half in my house. When I’m home I need to make tables about what we have sold on everyday using MS Office Excel. Today my DNS wasn’t working and a DNS fail means a layoff for me. I figured it was a DNS problem because Firefox was unable to open any page but, when I tried to open a page by its IP, nothing wrong happens.

I used OpenDNS and it saved me by allowing me to connect and send to my boss. This is how OpenDNS saved my job.

Thank You. I’m really loving it.

-Caio

Happy holidays everyone.