It’s not news: a few years ago, RoadRunner and its various allied ISPs around the US decided to parse your typos and instead of the usual 404 page display a RoadRunner portal.
The portal displays – surprise, surprise – ads related to whatever URL you had typed in, plus a search box and a tiny link to a “Preferences” page to turn things on or off.
You can turn the error-trapping on or off, have a filtration system for adult content, etc.
The problem is that no matter how often I encounter that portal page and turn the features off, the portal keeps appearing every couple of days, sometimes once a day.
The solution wasn’t to spend another 30 minutes on the phone with RoadRunner; instead, I started using the OpenDNS IPs for my DNS settings.
For a home-office setup, it’s quite simple.
If you have a router hardware connected to your modem, you need to edit it at that level. If you don’t, you should be editing the networking settings; the Primary and Secondary DNS IPs are as follows:
Primary: 208.67.222.222 and Secondary: 208.67.220.220
Then reboot your router or your PC and you’re good to go.
Connections should generally be faster due to extensive geocaching done by the OpenDNS infrastructure. And most importantly, you won’t be seeing that crappy ISP portal page ever again.
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I miss the old days. Back when RFCs were respected and you could trust something as basic as friggin DNS not to spy on you.
And we’re way beyond the upsell crap that Belkin built into their consumer class routers a couple years ago. Now we’re at the point where Juniper is selling ZIP+4 capable coding inside the routers they’re pushing to ISPs. And on and on.
It would be naive to think that the purity of the net was going to be around forever. But the ISPs and other actors (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) are really pushing the envelope both technically and legally.
Sorry for the rant.
On topic: Level 3 DNS is still ok (4.2.2.1 etc.). Also, it appears that dnsserverlist.org is on the up-and-up. I use it to tweak every few months. Just be sure to do a reverse IP to see if the netrange owner looks at all scummy. Cheers.
SL – Many thanks for the technical analysis, ranting is ok. You have valid points; why would we have to pay for something that’s expected to come as standard (I had to order the $9.95/year package from OpenDNS to get rid of the ads). At least, that was an option whereas I don’t have that option with Roadrunner.