Which name servers do you use?

[Hans Schnehl]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 08:58:41PM +0100, Marco Bonetti wrote:
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> 
> hi all,
> I was lurking through my tor logs recently, when this notice comes to my
> attention:
> 
> Jan 23 03:25:05.416 [notice] Your DNS provider has given "$IP_ADDRESS"
> as an answer for 6 different invalid addresses. Apparently they are
> hijacking DNS failures. I'll try to correct for this by treating future
> occurrences of "$IP_ADDRESS" as 'not found'.
> 
AFAIK OpenDns are financing their service by 'hijacking' invalid requests.
They do actually announce this somewhere on their website, so people using them 
should know. It is their business-model to take unknown and invalid requests to
paid-for sites with the usual links etc. To my opinion this is all right,
as they in return provide a really fast service, as you mentioned. 
This consequently leads to Tor's above notice and the IP of the link-farm site
to be treated as 'not found'. And  that's just fine. 
  

> Two days ago I've added OpenDNS name servers on top of my resolv.conf,
> effectively replacing the Open Root Server Network ones which I usually
> use, to try them out. I like ORSN philosophy and way of work[1] but I've
> to admit that OpenDNS servers are dramatically faster.
> 
> So, here comes the questions: which ones do you use? Are there any other
> interesting name servers to try out?

There are sufficient numbers of  open nameservers out in the net, of which many try 
to earn money by taking invalid requests to linkfarms of various qualities, if
the word quality is appropriate in this context. 
I think these are not a bad choice for Tor, as they let especially dial-up 
Tor-ops avoid bothering their ISP's sometimes rotten nameservers. 
Some of those probably exist only for the purpose of logging requests, but that's
not crucial, the ISP can do this too. 
I use fast servers somewhere in Ukrainia which do the same thing, (advertising),
and so Tor comes up with the message 
and the reaction and everything else is fine.
(I also block the regarding IP's)  

> 
> ciao,
> marco



> [1] see: http://www.orsn.org/ and http://www.opendns.com/
These are both a good choice, whereas OpenDNS certainly is faster 
(hopefully ORSN will get better soon).
 

Regards

Hans