Are you the keymaster. Or how to stop some joker messing up your beautiful network by screwing with client side DNS.

Scenario: You’re a system administrator/network administrator/IT guy (whatever you want to call it) with an excellent setup, and while you sit staring at the blinking lights in the comms room pondering the quintessential meaning of things, or more realistically chatting on IRC (whatever floats your boat) you’re interrupted for the fifteenth time that week by that luser, um user you were forced to give local admin access to. Turns out now they can’t access the intranet or send e-mail.

Upon investigating you find that once again this user has changed the DNS settings on their computer, breaking Active Directory/OpenLDAP/e-mail whatever, despite repeated warnings. They’re operating under the mistaken belief that using the DNS servers provided by OpenDNS, Google DNS or any number of resolvers found here. Will make their Interweb downloads of funny cat pictures faster, you’ve tried chatting and explaining it to the guy, you tried approaching their line manager with no success. Short of beating the user with a hammer you need to find a way to resolve this situation, what do you do? You could block external DNS but that’s only half an answer. If they do it again it will break more connectivity. … →