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[islesv]

So I was waiting for my domain name http://eduphil.org/ to propagate, but I need to work on it. Using a technique suggested in the How To forum, I changed my DNS to OpenDNS, and indeed I could access my site using OpenDNS.

But while I was working on a page for about 30 minutes, the unthinkable happened: there was an error when I attempted to save it.

Dang me, I told myself. Okay, I'll try hitting refresh, most of time whatever is in the textarea is still available for another POST. But since the default behavior of OpenDNS is to replace nonexistent, unavailable pages with their custom page, I could not locate my text any more.

Moral of the story: save early, save often, and stay away from OpenDNS.

[DarthScape]

Maybe you should have used FileZilla and Notepad++ instead of the 110mb file editor.

[The Midnight Coder]

Maybe you should have used FileZilla and Notepad++ instead of the 110mb file editor.

yup. saving it on ur comp and then uploading is much better.

[islesv]

Nope, I was using Drupal's content editor. The default behavior of Firefox, if the target of a POST could not be reached, is to keep that data in some place, so if you do a refresh, it will be reposted. However... OpenDNS tells FF that the page could not be found (soft 404), instead of network unreachable (what code is that?).

[The Midnight Coder]

u shud try Opera. it is much better is stuff like this happens. that is one of the reasons i switched from FF2 to Opera

[antimatter15]

u shud try Opera. it is much better is stuff like this happens. that is one of the reasons i switched from FF2 to Opera

This isn't a browser behavior problem.

I hate it when every time you mention "Firefox" or "IE" someone goes and says "You should try ___ its better than ___"

iselsv: did you try pressing the "back" button? For me, it normally fills out the form fields with the previous values.

And, some web-based text editors offer auto-save (a wonder), and Its not worth using any editor without autosave. Ive had like 30 times where i was typing a long essay (or post, longer than this one) and (magically) firefox (now, don't suggest Opera, or else....) disappears (ooh!) and all my information is lost. When i turn restart firefox, it asks me if i wanna do "Restore Session", but Oh no!, the form fields are not there anymore (..though, if you used opera, everything is exactly where it was, and you spend an hour thinking why your site still says its a post from 1995, because of the crazy cache)

[inp o҉rtb]

Or take the browser offline, _then_ hitting back. It usually works for me, and Firefox has a nifty Work Offline menu option.

[The Midnight Coder]

u shud try Opera. it is much better is stuff like this happens. that is one of the reasons i switched from FF2 to Opera

This isn't a browser behavior problem.

I hate it when every time you mention "Firefox" or "IE" someone goes and says "You should try ___ its better than ___"

iselsv: did you try pressing the "back" button? For me, it normally fills out the form fields with the previous values.

And, some web-based text editors offer auto-save (a wonder), and Its not worth using any editor without autosave. Ive had like 30 times where i was typing a long essay (or post, longer than this one) and (magically) firefox (now, don't suggest Opera, or else....) disappears (ooh!) and all my information is lost. When i turn restart firefox, it asks me if i wanna do "Restore Session", but Oh no!, the form fields are not there anymore (..though, if you used opera, everything is exactly where it was, and you spend an hour thinking why your site still says its a post from 1995, because of the crazy cache)

yup but u shuld be smart enough to press F5 when that happens

Or take the browser offline, _then_ hitting back. It usually works for me, and Firefox has a nifty Work Offline menu option.

most browsers do have that option

[antimatter15]

u shud try Opera. it is much better is stuff like this happens. that is one of the reasons i switched from FF2 to Opera

This isn't a browser behavior problem.

I hate it when every time you mention "Firefox" or "IE" someone goes and says "You should try ___ its better than ___"

iselsv: did you try pressing the "back" button? For me, it normally fills out the form fields with the previous values.

And, some web-based text editors offer auto-save (a wonder), and Its not worth using any editor without autosave. Ive had like 30 times where i was typing a long essay (or post, longer than this one) and (magically) firefox (now, don't suggest Opera, or else....) disappears (ooh!) and all my information is lost. When i turn restart firefox, it asks me if i wanna do "Restore Session", but Oh no!, the form fields are not there anymore (..though, if you used opera, everything is exactly where it was, and you spend an hour thinking why your site still says its a post from 1995, because of the crazy cache)

yup but u shuld be smart enough to press F5 when that happens

Or take the browser offline, _then_ hitting back. It usually works for me, and Firefox has a nifty Work Offline menu option.

most browsers do have that option

Oftentimes Opera doesn't re-download pages on F5, and uses things from the cache. Even if you set all the settings to "NO CACHE" it'll cache anyways.

[Piotr GRD]

I am doing always (when the text is long) one thing before submit: select all and CTRL+C
If anything goes wrong and after few attepts I still can not send data - I got everything in memory, I can turn on Notepad and CTRL+V and save everything in temp.txt file.

[antimatter15]

I tried doing that for some time, but i keep forgetting 

[The Midnight Coder]

Oftentimes Opera doesn't re-download pages on F5, and uses things from the cache. Even if you set all the settings to "NO CACHE" it'll cache anyways.

never happened to me so far

[antimatter15]

whatever, this is not a browser war topic, its just about DNS servers.

So, is OpenDNS good?

[Ellimist]

So, is OpenDNS good?

Good?! It's awesome! DNS propagation takes minutes.
And if your ISP's DNS servers are overloaded, you'll notice a significant improvement in speed if you use OpenDNS's DNS servers.

[islesv]

I did hit F5, but as I've written, the default behavior of OpenDNS is not to tell the browser that it was unable to reach the target, instead, it tells the user. What use is that? Obviously FF depends on the POST result to decide what to do with the data currently in memory, and OpenDNS says it's okay to discard them.

OpenDNS can be useful for certain purposes, but in this aspect they can really learn something.

[antimatter15]

Don't hit f5, just go offline, and then go back

[Krickët]

I use OpenDNS and love it. I've never had a problem with it.

Also, you shouldn't blame OpenDNS for your own mistakes. You should know better than to work on something ONLINE for a half and hour and not make a hard copy backup on your computer. Errors can happen at ANY time and just because you failed to setup a fail safe does not mean people should stay away from openDNS.

[islesv]

I use OpenDNS and love it. I've never had a problem with it.

I never said I hate OpenDNS. I am just stating a caveat here. I'm even using it right now.

Also, you shouldn't blame OpenDNS for your own mistakes.

And neither am I blaming OpenDNS. What I was saying is that they do not follow the usual way DNS servers process unresolvable names. Instead of that, they return a page to the user informing the user that the target cannot be reached -- they don't even return a 404 to the browser. Now, this may sound silly, but I think you know that there are some scripts which would simply break if you using OpenDNS and you could not resolve the name. For example, if your way of testing if the target is reachable is to check the return of get_addr_info, OpenDNS will return the addr_info of its own soft 404 page. Not very cool, right?

You should know better than to work on something ONLINE for a half and hour and not make a hard copy backup on your computer. Errors can happen at ANY time and just because you failed to setup a fail safe does not mean people should stay away from openDNS.

Again, I am not saying that you should not use OpenDNS. I am saying a warning. If you are just browsing the Net, OpenDNS would be great. But there are times when you better not use OpenDNS.

Is it just me, or does any body here also recognize the difference between a 404 and a 408?

[Slittzle]

I don't support opendns, because ultimately you're voluntarily putting up a teritary provider in front of you. You're literally allowing a third party commercial organization to delegate what websites are returned. Now I'm not suggesting they're doing this, but they may and very well could in the future basically start censoring competition or return certain sites slower. It plays heavily with net neutrality - who's to say they don't start "ignoring" or "losing" dns requests for competing sites or return faster queries for "sponsored" sites.

I'm not saying they're doing this, or that they will - but the chance for misuse is too high that I wouldn't use it. They're are of course benefits to using it, but personally I want that last mile to involve as few organizations as possible (ideally me and my isp, not me, my isp and some 3rd party organization).

[klaue]

I don't support opendns, because ultimately you're voluntarily putting up a teritary provider in front of you. You're literally allowing a third party commercial organization to delegate what websites are returned. Now I'm not suggesting they're doing this, but they may and very well could in the future basically start censoring competition or return certain sites slower.

Exactly. It's basically like blacklists. When someone has such power, it's only a matter of time until they abuse it. Think of what happened to the spam blacklist MAPS: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/12/13/1853237
Because of such things, Spamhaus was built, but oh well: http://www.paulgraham.com/sblbad.html
I myself was once blocked by spamhaus because they decided to block lycos just because of 3 spammers that used lycos adresses
This spam-stuff should just be an example (I don't want to start a discussion about pro's and con's of spam-blacklists) that people with a power to block someone (in this case, someones homepage) tend to use it for not-so-good things. That's the reason why i would never use OpenDNS

Besides, there is also a privacy issue - If you use OpenDNS, they know which pages you visit. Together with an account on their page, they could sell this information to spammers and the like.