(no subject)

The roommate and I are using Qwest DSL for our internet link (at least until the price goes up; I expect we'll reconsider at that point...), and it turns out that Qwest's DNS servers suck ass! Or something—whenever I would click a link to a domain I hadn't yet visited that day, I'd get a site not found error maybe 15% of the time. It'd resolve the domain properly if I waited a second and hit the try again button on the error page, but really—that's a hell of a lot of bogus errors, and they were driving me bats.

Anyway, I remembered John Gruber being on about Comcast's DNS servers a while back, and tracked down his link to OpenDNS. I've been trying it, and heyo whoa hey, 100% fixed.

There is, of course, a cost: they take away Firefox's ability to do an I'm Feeling Lucky search when you feed something bogus into the address bar, which is a feature I've grown quite fond of over the years. (Basically: Firefox first checks to see if you've typed in a valid URL, then it asks the internet whether the thing you've typed in is the significant portion of a domain name (i.e., "amazon" for amazon.com), then it does whatever search is specified in the keyword.URL about:config entry. OpenDNS jumps in at step 2, telling the browser that your bogus input WAS a valid domain name and then redirecting it to a page of somewhat crappy search results.) I can see why they do this; it's probably lucrative, and they've got to keep the lights on somehow. Still: irritating.

Not, however, irritating enough to send me back to Qwest's broken-ass name servers. It's easy to work around it with a bookmark keyword, so whatever. Functional workaround + complaining on LJ = problem solved!