Australian DNS problem????

[j-retired]

A friend of mine (ex UK) lives in Oz, and is busy researching her family history, using "Ancestry.co.uk" as a source.  For some unknown reason she is now directed to the Australian site, on which she has no credit. She does have an account with the uk one, and has been able to access it in the past. I suggested to her that she use the direct numeric address for the UK site, which I in the UK looked up and supplied to her. I thought this would stop the ISP's DNS from redirecting.

Sadly, this does not appear to work, as she still gets redirected to the Oz site.  I thought that if one entered a direct numeric address, that was where one went ..... unless the ISP is applying some form of censoring or similar control.  She is using Firefox - I persuaded her long ago that IE was bad news, but on XP.  I apologize for that, in that this is a Linux forum, but..... everyone here is SO helpful!!!! 

So.... what can she do next folks?  Any ideas will be appreciated.

j

[djohnston]

She can try setting her DNS lookup to OpenDNS. Use addresses:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

If she uses Firefox, there is a plugin called NoRedirect.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=noredirect&cat=all&lver=any&pid=1&sort=&pp=20&lup=&advanced=

Hope she gets it worked out. That kind of stuff can be really frustrating.

[j-retired]

NoRedirect - I didn't know about that one - I'll pass that on and report back evetnually - thanks.

j

[j-retired]

Apparently it works. Thnx.

j

[djohnston]

I'm not sure if you mean the OpenDNS settings, or the NoRedirect addon for FF. In any case, glad it works. I hate redirects.

[Village Idiot]

NoRedirect - I didn't know about that one - I'll pass that on and report back evetnually - thanks.

j

Nor did I. Thanks djohnston.

And a word of warning to anyone considering doing family tree compilation. Don't be surprised if you discover a skeleton or two!  

 

[j-retired]

Hi,
The "NoRedirect" works. Then she also got a reply to a "help" e-mail from the site pointing out an obscure 'box' she could tick which was also supposed to give the same effect!

Thanks,
j

[shrinivas]

Would using a proxy server also help ?

[uncleV]

And a word of warning to anyone considering doing family tree compilation. Don't be surprised if you discover a skeleton or two!  

 

Where one would expect to find those folks?

[DBobb]

DNS servers can often be configured in the router as well. This is probably the best solution as you only have to do it once.

@shrinivas: I would be hesitant to recommend using a proxy server for something as simple as redirecting DNS. Proxy servers can increase latency (AKA: responsiveness AKA: ping time) since they introduce extra servers that the traffic must go through. In addition if the proxy server doesnt have good thoroughput (most notably upload thoroughput) then the overall internet speed will be limited, which wouldnt make it good for anything more intensive than web browsing.

Proxy servers *can* be useful for some cases though. At one point I carried around a windows shell script (bat file) that would connect the PC I was using to my home proxy server and encrypt the traffic. This would allow the contents of whatever I was doing online to be nice and encrypted, often getting around restrictions on the host network that I was using at the time. It would also do other neat things like connect me to my home PC's SSH server (giving me full terminal access, and ability to download files from my home PC using SFTP)