GregHowley.com

DNS Confusion

April 26, 2005 -

I just saw one of the strangest internet-related things I've ever seen.

When I go to netsol.com from home, I get the NetworkSolutions home page. Of course, right? But this morning, my wife was trying to register a domain for her employer and had trouble getting to the address I'd given her. I popped by her office just now, and found that when you visit netsol.com or NetworkSolutions.com from her office, you reach Bill Booz Photography. The address bar reads as NetworkSolutions, but the page is BillBooz.com - it's as if the name is parked at Bill Booz's site. If this is at all widespread, this guy is getting some serious traffic. And yes, I checked Linda's HOSTS file.

Comments on DNS Confusion
 
Comment Wed, April 27 - 7:01 PM by pmd
If this is indeed widespread, maybe something happening with the ISP or something and not spyware... I'd say tell the "real" owner of the domain and see how they react. Considering that it's Network Solutions however... I find it extremely funny.
 
Comment Thu, April 28 - 2:55 PM by tagger
Guys - I was going to stay out of this, but after reading PMD's comment, I feel I have to say _something_.

This is clearly a DNS problem, but if the HOSTS file is clean, it probably has nothing to do with spyware, hackers or the End of the Internet As We Know It. What is not known is if it is a local or a global DNS that's having the problem. That's why I suggested running tracert against the Domain Name - it will tell you how packets are getting to wherever it is they're going. If you can ping the thing, see what's coming back for am IP address. You might also try using nslookup to change the DNS you're using to resolve the name. Run it a few times with different DNS servers and see if you get the same number each time. The fact that it works from home but not from work indicates different DNS servers are being used to resolve the name - not a big surprise - and that the one you're hitting from home has a good lookup table.

Depending on how Linda's local DNS is set up to resolve names, it's entirely possible that she's hitting a DNS somewhere that has a corrupted table - happens all the time, unfortunately. The very nature of DNS is that the service keeps looking until it either resolves the name or times out and returns an error.

BTW - it it still doing it?
 
Comment Thu, April 28 - 7:22 PM by Greg
No idea - this was Linda's place of employment, and I'm not there on her computer too much. I'll check next time I'm there.