My experience with swisscom's "eurospot" hotspots ended up involving my tunneling everything over my VPN. John -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Suresh Ramasubramanian Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 10:08 PM To: nanog list Subject: broken DNS proxying at public wireless hotspots Right now, I'm on a swisscom eurospot wifi connection at Paris airport, and this - yet again - has a DNS proxy setup so that the first few queries for a host will return some nonsense value like 1.2.3.4, or will return the records for com instead. Some 4 or 5 minutes later, the dns server might actually return the right dns record. ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 25634 ;; flags: qr ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 13, ADDITIONAL: 11 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.kcircle.com. IN A ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: com. 172573 IN NS j.gtld-servers.net. com. 172573 IN NS k.gtld-servers.net. [etc] ;; Query time: 1032 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.48.1#53(192.168.48.1) ;; WHEN: Sat Feb 3 11:33:07 2007 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 433 They're not the first provider I've seen doing this, and the obvious workarounds (setting another NS in resolv.conf, or running a local dns caching resolver) dont work either as all dns traffic is proxied. Sure I could route dns queries out through a ssh tunnel but the latency makes this kind of thing unusable at times. I'm then reduced to hardwiring some critical work server IPs into /etc/hosts What do nanogers usually do when caught in a situation like this? thanks srs -- Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists@gmail.com)