Aside: One large British ISP, having grown rapidly through acquisition, now offers DSL services using several different autonomous system numbers but does not appear to have set up reliable peering/routing between them. This can lead to situations for some DSL users where no route exists to the ISP's name servers from addresses allocated by DHCP. In these circumstances, OpenDNS is the easiest and quickest solution (try calling any ISP's help desk and reporting issues with routing or peering).

OpenDNS just keeps getting better and better, though, and it now offers in addition to speed:

• Typo correction
• Wildcard filtering (Cameroon, for example)
• Phishing protection
• Adult site blocking
• Custom domain blocking
• Whitelists to balance both of these
• Shortcuts (TinyURL, but just for you)
• Exceptions, so that you can selectively turn off typo correction (it is already off by default for DNSBL look-ups)

To use most of these features, you need to sign up for an account, but you can do this even if you have a dynamically assigned IP address as OpenDNS supports DynDNS.

Another feature of OpenDNS, for account holders, is that detailed stats are available in a private dashboard, so that you can see what has been going on DNSwise from any computer on your network over the past few days.

On looking at the stats for my home network the other day, one item gave me cause to scratch my head a little.

There was a non-trivial number of AAAA look-ups going on.

In case you don't know (and I know you do), AAAA look-ups are IPv6 address look-ups.

• There is no computer on my home network running IPv6
• Neither my border router nor my ISP is IPv6 aware

So, what's going on?

Fine tuning the dashboard query a little, we can see that all of the AAAA DNS queries are for hosts in the wii.com domain.

Mystery solved.

While the computers here use IPv4, it appears that the Wii at least tries to use IPv6 - it falls back to IPv4 when that fails.

So it appears that Nintendo expects you to be still using the same Wii when IPv6 becomes mandatory in 2012.

Category: Wii
Technorati: IPv6 Wii

1. John Roberts23/10/2007 20:38:36
Homepage: http://www.opendns.com/

Did not know that about the Wii speaking IPv6... that is a fun factoid. I don't have one... yet.

Thanks for using our service.

John Roberts
OpenDNS

2. David Ulevitch23/10/2007 21:28:13
Homepage: http://david.ulevitch.com/

Nice write up. Thanks for all the kinds words and all the feedback you give us!

3. Martijn de Jong25/10/2007 11:39:50

Why not?
Well, the mentioned speed actually. It might have been an accidental temporary hickup, but when I went to my new ISP with a superfast connection (24 mbit/s symmetric), DNS lookups were suddenly terribly slow. Moved the OpenDNS servers down my list of ftp servers and there was the speed that I would expect from my connection...

4. Kerry Liles26/10/2007 17:20:41

I believe there have been some reports on issues with OpenDNS (I am sure Google will reveal all as usual...)

but, regardless, I use 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.1 which are apparently public dns servers 'out there' in Level3 land. They are very fast for me (within 30ms ping at the moment and almost all the time). I believe L3 provides those IP addresses via some sort of router announcement so you are routed to the closest one of a number of identical dns servers (sorry, not up to date on BGP etc)

5. mike28/10/2007 09:19:16

My isp - 165.21.83.88
ping ranging from 10 to 13ms

opendsn - 208.67.222.222
352 to 450ms

obviously i use my isp's dns
thanks.

6. Jeroen Massar05/04/2008 23:56:42
Homepage: http://unfix.org/~jeroen/

As I have a Wii, I finally checked how much “IPv6” is actually in there. The only thing I could find it doing though was that it is doing an AAAA query, though after an A query when going to eg the shopping site. But that is also the only thing it does, even when using Opera (Internet Channel). I don’t see it do any IPv6 ND/RD/DAD, thus as such, I can’t believe it does any IPv6 at all either.

Thus where does this “Wii Factoid” come from, as when it was a fact it should be doing IPv6 in my network. That it does DNS AAAA queries is one thing, but it doesn’t mean that it actually does IPv6 at all.

Note that the Wii queries first for an A record and then an AAAA, this should be the other way around, but I guess the people who implemented it might have done this to be sure that an A query always works, especially in the light of broken DNS caches that croak when they get an AAAA record, which would mean loads of support calls.

7. Chris Linfoot06/04/2008 09:03:06

> where does this “Wii Factoid” come from

Jeroen, the factoid I describe here is that the Wii does AAAA DNS lookups. This is self evidently true.

As to why?

Ask Nintendo. They have some very clever people working there and they didn't put a small piece (DNS lookups only) of an IPv6 stack into the Wii by accident.

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