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I've been having a strange, intermittent issue that I think is tied to DNS. It's hard to describe exactly, so I'm just going to list what's happened.
- I first noticed it with Facebook a few months ago. Once in a while, every request to Facebook would resolve to MySpace. Watching Firefox's traffic via LiveHttpHeaders, there didn't seem to be a browser redirect going on. Trying to request the site in any other browser also redirected to MySpace. I deleted all cookies tied to either site in Firefox, flushed DNS, but nothing happened. Just had to wait for it to go away.
- It's started happening with Twitter as well. As an example, today Twitter started resolving to some spammy-looking Blogger blog. However, in this case it was only happening in Chrome, not happening in IE-- I switched browsers a few weeks ago, which makes it doubly frustrating (and makes me suspect something lower-level than the browser). However, I did import all passwords, favorites, etc from Firefox to Chrome
Flushing DNS and restarting the browser fixes the problem some times, but in other cases I just have to wait and see. Searching the site, I came across a question that suggested using the ICSI Netalyzr. The report threw up two red flags:
- A detected in-network HTTP cache incorrectly caches information
- Your DNS resolver returns results even when no such server exists
And two warnings:
- Network packet buffering may be excessive
- A detected in-network HTTP cache exists in your network
Do any of these sound like a possible culprit? Red flag #2 is just Comcast being skeevy. Looks like #1 is much the same.
+1 for OpenDNS, try that one. If the issue vanishes, it's the DNS from your provider (either broken or poisoned). – Bobby – 2010-01-05T22:13:30.147
Also check for some spyware/malware which could rewrite the hosts file. Do you have any proxy server setup ? – jfmessier – 2010-01-05T23:31:41.970
No proxy server, no weird entries in hosts. I've still got my main DNS as Comcast (the secondary has been Google for a while, probably changed in the middle of this). I'll swap it over to Google or OpenDNS completely tomorrow once @comcastcares responds to my question about this. – Tom – 2010-01-06T03:31:24.807