All bogus hostnames resolve to 67.215.65.132

[mar.arduini]

Hello, I'm writing a bash script for Mac Os X Mavericks, and in the first phase I have to perform a DNS lookup (I used the host and dig +short commands). My DNS servers on the router are set to the OpenDNS servers.

While testing, I noticed that every bogus domain name (as wlekrjlksjdaf.it or wlekrjlksjdaf.com) gets resolved to the IP address 67.215.65.132 instead of throwing an exception (or the command returning a value other than 0).

Does it make any sense? Can anyone explain to me why this happens?

Thanks in advance :)

[rotblitz]

This does make sense.  This is to redirect browsers to the OpenDNS Guide in case domains do not exist or do not have an A record associated with it.  The advertisements on the Guide page pay for the free services of OpenDNS.

You can treat this 67.215.65.132 (hit-nxdomain.opendns.com) as a replacement for NXDOMAIN DNS lookup results.

You can also disable this NXDOMAIN redirection under Advanced Settings / Domain Typos, but then you lose content filtering with the free version.  You had to upgrade to VIP to allow both, disabling NXDOMAIN redirection and content filtering enabled.

[mar.arduini]

Hello,

your answer is very clear, I'll follow your suggestion and treat that IP as NXDOMAIN.

Thanks a lot! :-)

Marco