ACT Fibernet and OPENDNS

[Ankur Rohatgi]

Hi,
I have been on ACT fibernet in Delhi for many months now and am happy with the speed. A couple of days back i noticed interruption in my network which i diagnosed to not being able to use Open DNS anymore. I use that for filtering ,its important in a home with children having access to digital media.

Is anyone else having any such issues ? Anyone using OpenDNS with ACT ?

thanks.

UPDATE: Just spoke to someone from their tech team. It is indeed blocked due to some DNS attack at their end. Even their own DNS server got compromised. They said it should be available in about a month.

 

[Anil]

yes they had changed there dns but opendns is working fine iam from Hyderabad useing ACTFibernet

 

[Karan]

WTF! DNS Attack? will be available in a month? Did someone bomb their data center or what.

I am sorry but this "tech team" you just spoke to fed you a load of BS by that response they gave. OpenDNS is a separate entity, they have nothing to do with ACT. If ACT got attacked then it would be ACT's DNS that would be down, not OpenDNS.

You can always check OpenDNS' system status here for yourself - OpenDNS > System (also available at http://208.69.38.170/) There have been no major instances of downtime on that page at all

Please let us know how exactly did you arrive at the conclusion that OpenDNS is at fault? What kind of tests did you run?

 

[Ankur Rohatgi]

Karan,
I dont mean to insult your intelligence and i dont know your technical background but i have some . So when i say the the opendns servers were not allowing lookups it doesnt mean that Opendns was down. Basically ACT had blocked it from resolving, probably by blocking port 53.

If you want to know how i could tell it was blocked, i spoke to someone at OpenDNS and used their own debug command "
nslookup -timeout=10 -type=txt debug.opendns.com. 208.67.222.222" which then resulted in a timeout which it shouldnt. I also double checked with another network at my house provided by Airtel and it resolved just fine.

The guy i spoke to at ACT did confirm that they had blocked it and also they had put the Google dns as a temporary DNS for their DHCP system to send out. This also i checked in my router log, i was getting 8.8.8.8 as dns once i made the PPPoE connection.

Now obviously the guy i spoke to didnt really know accurately how long it will take so i think he just gave me the 1 month reply. But i checked today and its working again so atleast for now, problem solved. It is also possible that they were screwing around with their DNS and inadvertently blocked OpenDNS and only when i complained they realised it and fixed it. These kind of things do happen in network setups but with ISPs its rare but not impossible.

cheers.

 

[Karan]

No offense taken. Its just the one month response seemed to be one of those "lets feed some BS to this guy to get him off our back".

Good to know that the issue is resolved. :emoji_thumbsup:

 

[Anil]

if you use ACT Fibernet in PPPOE mode one time or the other they freequently scrue up so its better to configur your router in automatic ip.

 

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[Ankur Rohatgi]

It IS set for auto ip, the pppoe is the means to provide the login credentials. The dns is something i set manually to the OpenDNS servers.

 

[warpspeed]

Since you're already using OpenDNS, why don't you give Cisco's DNSCrypt a try? It basically encrypts your DNS lookup so ACT can't block your queries in future.

Link - DNS Security with DNSCrypt | OpenDNS

DNScrypt tool - Simple DNSCrypt - Official Project Home Page

 

[Jay]

DNScrypt is not working for me at all. None of the DNS listed is resolving. OpenDNS works fine normally.

Blocked by ACT?

Source

 

[Jay]

Lot of DNS hijacking going on ACT. If you were to query a site like liveleak.com, it resolves to 202.83.21.15, an ACT ip. Breaks a lot of stuff.
For eg. pipl.com is rendered useless.