[mdlug] OT: Comcast rant

[Joseph C. Bender]

Aaron Kulkis wrote:
> gib at juno.com wrote:
>> Perhaps you could set up open DNS as a secondary. I think it is 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
>>
> 
> Good Idea (and I'm not talking about the Good Idea Fairy), even though
> (as I states below) I've yet to see a DNS outage with U-verse.
> 

	The advice I always dispense is that anyone who can, really should just 
run their own caching recursive DNS server and not rely on their 
upstream ISP's DNS servers.  BIND on many distros will at least work for 
the local box it's installed on "out of the box", so to speak.

Add the fact that you can also make the same server *authoritative* for 
the LAN's resources (using the .local or .lan TLD if you don't happen to 
have a domain you can subdomain locally) and now you've got an even more 
useful tool.

I run a caching and local authoritative resolver on my firewall at home, 
and have for many years, rendering me effectively immune to my ISP's DNS 
server issues (but not CMTS maintenance, can't really solve against the 
local loop going down).

Given that there's been cases in the last year or so (WideOpenWest is 
one, I *think* Cox or Charter was one of the others) where the ISP's DNS 
servers were deliberately monkeying with DNS lookups to inject their own 
ads or content into pages, it only makes sense.  This is contingent on 
the ISP not blocking 53 TCP/UDP to anything but their own servers, however.


-JCB