I rarely post anything work related here, but theres very little info on the net about this subject. We use sprint uplink as our caching dns servers. Their ips are 204.117.214.10 and 199.2.252.10. These are public DNS caching servers as can be found in info here: http://www.sprint.net/index.php?module=faq/dns. Within the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed unresolved domain names such as www.asldfkjawfjsadlfksjafa.com no longer give a name can’t be found error, 404 or something. Instead they go to www.seek-aid.net and seek-aid.net attempts to help you search for the result. Of course, these results are advertisements, and I’d assume seek-aid.net and whoever is routing traffic to them (in this case sprint) gets a cut of the profits. Others have verified their own upstream provider has modified their dns resovling to go to seek-aid, one example is comcast. A link to another thread about a guy finding out the service is called paxfire can be found here: http://www.castlecops.com/t166715-seek_aid_net_taking_over_my_searches.html
I have verified this by removing the sprint dns servers from our system and inserting 4.2.2.2 which is a widely known other dns server. After doing this, clearing our local dns cache and restarting dns services seek-aid.net magically disappears. I called sprint to confirm the issue. The first few people I spoke with didn’t understand the problem. I was finally able to convince someone what was going on, he said he’d look into it. About 5 people got on the line all at once and was asking me what was the error. I said well that’s the problem. I’m not getting an error. I’m getting this seek-aid.net site. I dont want that, I want a page can’t be found error.
One guy named Jeff got on and said this is what the internet does now. It’s the internet doing it. Like the internet is some entity. I said this only occured within the past 2 weeks, he said it’s the internet. I said Well my concern is… and he cut me off and said any discussion about it doesnt matter, this is the way the internet works now. Bullshit. I don’t want our mail server resovling names that dont exist to some ad revenue site thinking it’s a valid address because it received a response. I’ve removed their ip’s from our dns, denying them ad revenue from many many people. Switched to opendns (I know, ironic) for the time being until I can find a better solution.