[TriLUG] Time warner wierdness

[Ben Pitzer]

Hrm, yeah.  Well, actually, people who are getting their DNS server IPs via
DHCP, the way that they are supposed to, won't have that problem, but I
won't pick that fight.

TWC, as well as other broadband service providers, have had challenges that
are relatively new to the ISP industry, at least from a residential
subscribership standpoint.  A million modems, all online all of the time,
with at least 1.5-2x that number of CPEs (customer premise equipment, such
as your Linksys routers, Linux boxen, PCs, etc), all put a strain on
systems, especially DNS and mail.  This is due to a variety of reasons, not
the least of which is things like constant 1 or 2 minute email check
intervals configured in mail clients, security issues (a machine that's
always on the network is easier to hack than one that's only on for a few
hours a day), virus infections, RSS feeds, etc, etc, etc.  There are dozens
of background and hidden applications on the average Windows PC that hit DNS
constantly without even alerting the user.  Among them are virus scanning
applications that pull updates, the Windows updater itself, Macromedia's
flash player (also checks for updates), Mozilla, various media players, IM
applications, the Google Desktop app, Vonage, and others too numerous to
name.  Naturally, we in the geek community contribute mightily to such
things by running our own mail servers, web servers, DNS caching boxes,
Asterisk servers, and VPNs, among other things, easily more than our fair
share, and likely well more bandwidth, on average, than your average PC
user.

So, when you have your DNS services hammered constantly, and with growing
frequency, you have to try new things to make it work.  TWC has been doing
that.  Now, I haven't been there in a year and a half now, but I'm aware of
what they've done in the newest incarnation of DNS, and it makes sense.  I
was there for the previous redesign, and participated in the rebuild of that
service, which also made sense at the time.  There are challenges in load
balancing such things in a DOCSIS environment which were difficult to meet
under the previous system, the one I helped to implement, which resulted in
some users occasionally getting DNS latency, and some users getting
consistent DNS latency, and some folks getting almost no latency.  The new
system addresses that much better, as I understand it.

I can't imagine that this will be the last incarnation of a broadband DNS
system, and it's very possible that the next incarnation could result in yet
another change in IPs.

Now, as to the original question, I cannot imagine that TWC is using Bell
South DNS servers.  If you dig a domain name, what server returns the
request?  Can you duplicate that error via dig and show us the output?

-Ben


On 11/1/06, William Sutton <william at trilug.org> wrote:
>
> Not that I have an answer (I don't) (maybe uncle_ben does?) but in my past
> experience with TWC, they'd do stuff like suddenly change the ip addresses
> of the DNS servers without mentioning it to anyone.  I eneded up running
> caching-nameserver to avoid their funkiness.
>
> As an aside, TWC still ranks (IMVHO) well ahead of Comcast.  My experience
> with Comcast is that they redirect all queries for their DNS servers
> (from their clients, at least) to port 80 on the DNS server.  Then the
> server does a browser check.  As you may guess, it doesn't like Linux, so
> refuses to serve up the appropriate page.  Weird.  Again,
> caching-nameserver is a usable workaround.
>
> Just for what it is worth....
>
> --
> William Sutton
>
> On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Dave Sorenson wrote:
>
> > Why am I getting a Bellsouth DNS error from the DNS entries that Time
> > Warner has given me via DHCP? Are they really glomming BS's DNS or is
> > something else going on??
> >
> > Dave
> >
> --
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