At least on my connection in college park, i'm free to use other DNS servers (such as those at UMD, or the famed 4.2.2.2). currently the DNS servers comcast *wants* you to use are assigned along with the DHCP reply... But, setting them manually works just as well, that's what I do when comcast's DNS crashes. you're not really prohibited from doing so... and short of filtering all DNS traffic that isn't to a comcast-approved server at the router level, I'm not sure how they could stop it. (Although I wouldn't put it beyond them to do that; it seems like gross overkill, and would cause more problems that it would solve; even so...)
Although I guess I don't see how comcast using a service like DynDNS would be that noteworthy, since the majority of comcast customers probably wouldn't care too much... I don't know of any other "dynamic DNS" though. I'm inclined to believe it has to do with the reverse DNS changes I've observed over the last few months.
-phil
On 3/12/06, Rich Kulawiec <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 11, 2006 at 02:33:24PM -0500, Brian C Merrell wrote:
> I suppose I don't understand the problem. What are the ramifications of
> this? I also have Comcast, but I'm wondering if I have to care whether
> they use dynDNS or not, since I don't use their DNS servers.
I'm not very awake yet, but it would be interesting to see what Comcast's
note says. I'm guessing that this means that Comcast *still* hasn't figured
out how to run DNS on their consumer network (Google for "comcast dns")
and is now going to try yet another approach.
Are they saying that you *must* use Comcast's DNS servers for name resolution
and that you may not do otherwise? And that your designated DNS servers
will be assigned along with your [dynamic] IP address?
Yipes. I haven't had to revisit this particualr issue for a while, but the
last time I had to wade into the area, I found that apparently some of
Comcast's DNS servers would honor the TTL in DNS zones -- and some wouldn't.
Unfortunately, I didn't have access to a sufficient number of them to
figure out if there was a pattern: it _appeared_ to be random to me,
and it might well have been, but I'm not prepared to say that it was.
By the way, these were sane TTL values ("8 hours").
( I suppose it's possible that this is a feeble attempt by Comcast to
decrease its ranking as the #1 source of spam by monitoring the DNS
queries made by the millions of spam-spewing zombies on its network.
If so, it won't work. )
