wpad.home and isatap.home

[lastpotato99]

Hi,

We are monitoring what sites our homestay student is accessing by only having the having his computer use the OpenDNS servers and setting the pcs on our network to google DNS.

some of the requests which are coming up include wpad.home  isatap.home and jenny-pc.home (this is the name of another pc on the network). I am wanting to know what these requests mean and if we should be concerned about them.

Thanks in advance

Liam

[rotblitz]

These DNS queries are attempts for internal name resolution and are typical for Windows computers.  Except for maybe the jenny-pc these are not raised by a human, but by Windows, as almost all DNS queries are not being raised by humans.  The suffix .home further indicates that you have this DNS suffix configured on your DHCP server, most likely located on your router.

It seems that you also forward internal name resolution requests to OpenDNS.  This has to do with the way you configured the OpenDNS resolver addresses.  If you configured them on the LAN side, this is quite normal.  It would most likely disappear if you configured them on the WAN side of your router.

I cannot comment on your question whether or not you should be concerned.  This is entirely up to you.

[rotblitz]

"We are monitoring what sites our homestay student is accessing"

To clarify further: This is not what you can do with DNS stats.  A DNS service has no way to see what "sites" are actually "accessed".  It only sees what DNS queries have been raised.  There is no strict relationship between these two things.  DNS is the phone book of the internet, not the phone lines.  Especially, as I said, DNS queries are almost not raised and often also not caused by humans, but by software asking for name resolution, even for domain names which will never be accessed (e.g. DNS prefetching).

This misunderstanding was also the reason why you raised your question at all, right?