Redirect vs NXDOMAIN & Fallthrough

Forums Service Issues Networking, Routing, Technology Redirect vs NXDOMAIN & Fallthrough

  • August 12, 2020 at 9:15 pm

    I was configuring a friend’s router with Cleanbrowsing and I found something very peculiar happening – because the DNS lookup for adult sites on was failing on cleanbrowsing with NXDOMAIN, it was falling back to the ISP DNS, even when I setup cleanbrowsing in “all” of the available boxes for DNS servers that the router allowed.

    I realize that this is a router issue, and not a cleanbrowsing issue, however, I was unable to get around it with this particular router and I ended up setting up another “family” DNS resolver that implements a block page redirect.

    I understand why cleanbrowsing returns NXDOMAIN for a reason – to avoid a trackable redirect. However, I think it would be useful for you to have a redirect option that is publicized. I do understand this is something that can be done with your paid plans, but I feel without this option for the free plans, you may be preventing people from being able to use your service.

    I found a post online that indicated the adult servers that DO redirect to a block page are 185.228.168.11 & 185.228.169.11 (seems incorrect since it matches what is on your website as a regular IPv4 address)

    Any chance you could make the “default” redirect hosts available to help people that are stuck with routers like this?

    September 4, 2020 at 12:10 am

    Hi

    You are actually right, you want to use:

    .11 for adult
    .169 for family

    This will help address what you’re describing with the NXDOMAIN response being hijacked by the ISP.

    Thanks