Warning When Using OpenDNS

[Clemens Lang]

Hi,

> Since doing that, port prints a warning: Warning: Your DNS servers
> incorrectly claim to know the address of nonexistent hosts. This may cause
> checksum mismatches for some ports.

That's because the OpenDNS nameservers don't adhere to the RFC for DNS and
return results even for nonexistent domains. When this happens in your browser,
you'll see a search page provided by OpenDNS instead of an error message printed
by your browser. That's their way of trying to "be helpful" (and possibly
showing you some ads as well), but it breaks any non-GUI clients such as
MacPorts.

> What are the thoughts on this, is using their name servers beneficial and
> will it likely cause issues when using port?

With OpenDNS it will probably not cause issues, but often providers do the same
thing to their customers and return an IP address at their data center instead
of the proper NXDOMAIN response. MacPorts then tries to find the fastest mirror
out of a set of mirrors by selecting the server with the lowest ping response
time. If your provider is providing the bogus DNS answers it is usually the
fastest, gets selected and downloads fail. The OpenDNS servers are probably not
the fastest to ping, though.

Also note that you can disable this behavior in OpenDNS' control panel.

-- 
Clemens Lang