Mediacom still sucks
by Tim Faircloth on Oct 22, 2009, 10:14 am
After the tornado almost 3 years ago, I switched to Mediacom for my internet. At first, it was horrible in terms of reliability (and speed), but it has greatly improved in the past few years. Despite the fact that my internet is faster and more reliable, I am still displeased. This time it’s a matter of principle.
You see, some time ago a service popped up called OpenDNS which offered alternative DNS servers that anyone could use instead of their ISP’s DNS servers. They promised to be more efficient and speedy than your current DNS scheme, with an extra “feature”.
They called it “typo-proof DNS” or something like that. Basically, if I typed “googgle.com” (note the extra ‘g’ there) into my browser’s go box and hit enter, OpenDNS would redirect me to a search page to make sure I get to the right page. It’s a simple thing to implement… if there’s no DNS record for the url I typed in, give me a search.
The problem is that it messes up Firefox’s “Friendly URLs” feature. In firefox, if I type “google” with no “.com” or “www.”, it will try every combination of domain name with “google” in it…
google.com
www.google.com
google.net
www.google.net
…and so on…
…until it finds a domain that has a record (in this case, it would stop on “google.com”). This feature worked fine with several sites that ended with a common TLD (“.com”, “.net”, “.org”, etc) whether they used the “www.” or not — google, slashdot, yahoo… even this blog.
However, if I used OpenDNS, it would stop at “google” and redirect me to a search page, short circuiting Firefox’s feature. It drove me nuts, so I decided not to use OpenDNS unless I absolutely had to.
I said all that to say this: now Mediacom has decided to copy this feature on their DNS servers. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!
I guess I’ll have to cheat and use USG’s DNS servers (if I can use them at home).
