DNS Settings

Please note, DNS settings are a somewhat advanced topic. For most customers on DSL, MultiTenant or Microwave products, you should just set your computers to get their DNS information 'automatically'.

DNS for customers with static IP blocks:

If you have static IP blocks and are running your own servers in your office, your DNS settings will be:

198.182.207.3
74.220.240.164

DNS For webhosting:

We very much prefer all our webhosting customers to use us as their registrar for their domain registrations. We have wholesale 'back end' access to the domain registrar information this way, and can take care of many common updates for you on your behalf. In addition, if you are registered with another registrar and lose your e-mail address or password, you may find it extremely difficult to make any changes at all.

If you have webhosting services with us, you will want to set your name servers to:

ns1.openaccess.org
ns2.openaccess.org
ns3.openaccess.org

Please note, you can NOT use these servers as caching servers for the computers in your office.? They are non-recursive in order to prevent a variety of DNS attacks based on spoofing and cache poisoning.

DNS Architecture

DNS is a critical component to the global internet architecture.

In order to ensure maximum availability of our DNS servers, including the prevention of various attacks such as DNS poisoning and denials of service, we have some basic ground rules in place.? If you are planning to migrate IP addresses or make other changes to your network that involve DNS changes some of the following information may be helpful.

Time to Live: We typically use four hour TTL records for all DNS services.? This means it may take up to four hours for any DNS changes you make to propogate across the global internet.

Master / Slave: We utilize a 'hidden master' architecture.? With this design, our primary DNS server with the database that contains records for all our DNS zones is protected behind a firewall and inaccessible.? This machine once an hour pushes out the latest/greatest records to what would traditionally be considered a 'master' server.

Caching Servers: We utilize a distributed system of caching DNS servers.? This provides us with a scalable DNS architecture as well as prevents any single failure or attack from causing damage to our caching DNS infrastructure.? In addition, to prevent DoS attacks as well as avoid problems related to human error in DNS configuration (by us or anybody else on the internet), our caching servers ignore TTL records less than one hour (treating them as one hour) or greater than 24 hours (treating them as 24 hours).? The caching servers are fully independent, and thus may be caching TTL time-outs for various zones with differing intervals.? This means that a recently updated domain may appear to be updated in our caching servers when you review it from one physical location, but may not have had the update propogated if you review it from another physical location.? This is all of course within the 1-24 hour boundary described above, and of course for domains that we provide resolution for, within the 1-4 hour boundary.

Calculating Timelines for DNS Migration: Given the above for our standard TTL records as well as our 'hidden master' architecture, if you make DNS updates without planning in advance, it may take up to 5 hours for those records to propogate across the internet.? If you need to make DNS updates (especially for mail servers), please contact us at least 24 hours in advance and we can temporarily drop the TTL on your zone to 10 minutes and force-flush the updates to our public masters to make your migration as smooth as possible.