Dynamic IP Addresses: Error Messages

These 3 errors are related to networks that use dynamic IP addresses, which have been or are currently registered with OpenDNS by another account holder.

The Network Already Exists error occurs when the IP address of your network was, at one time, previously registered with OpenDNS by a different account holder. Because many networks use dynamic IP addresses, the IP address is now assigned to your network, but still linked to the original OpenDNS account holder.

The Your IP Address Taken or !Yours errors usually occur when updating your network IP address with the OpenDNS client-side IP updater. The conflict arises when the IP address being updated falls into one of the following two scenarios: 

1. Actual address is registered to another OpenDNS account holder.
2. The IP address falls in the range of a larger netblock, which is registered with another OpenDNS account holder.

When these network conflicts occurs, not all OpenDNS features can be fully configured on your network, though you will still be using OpenDNS servers and benefiting from our fast, secure and reliable Internet experience.

To resolve this issue, please contact us with details. Be sure and include the following: 

• The error message
• Your full name
• The email address used to create the account
• Your current IP address, found at the top of the OpenDNS home page

You may receive this error if you have just configured OpenDNS and are testing your configuration at our Welcome to OpenDNS test page. Typically, this issue will rectify itself within 3-5 minutes as the OpenDNS network registers your new network.

If it appears that your Web content filtering settings are no longer being applied to your network, and you have flushed DNS cache, this error is likely the result of an IP address conflict. The error is:

Your OpenDNS settings might not work due to DNS IP address (x.x.x.x) and HTTP IP address (x.x.x.x) mismatch.

This issue is usually caused by the way your ISP handles DNS traffic, and transparent proxies that create different "egress" IPs for DNS and HTTP traffic.   OpenDNS is unable to help with speific ISP related troubleshooting, but we recommend getting in touch with them and asking whether you are behind a transparent proxy. 

To see if your DNS traffic IP address is indeed different from your web traffic IP address, try the following:

• To find your DNS IP address, use the command line and run "nslookup myip.opendns.com"
• To find your web IP addresss, go to this site in your browser: http://myip.dnsomatic.com/

Typically these should be the same but if you're receiving this error, they would be different.

It is your DNS IP address which must be registered at https://dashboard.opendns.com/settings/ to make the additional features of OpenDNS work (blocking by category, blocking or whitelisting individually, stats and logs).

To see why there is a mismatch, you may want to run this test to see if you're behind a proxy: 
http://www.lagado.com/proxy-test

Alternatively, you can call up your ISP to find out why they route your DNS traffic differently from the rest of your traffic, and if there's a possibility to opt out from this different DNS traffic routing.

If you have tested your OpenDNS configuration and received the Oops! message, you may actually have OpenDNS configured correctly but be experiencing a problem related to how your ISP provisions your Internet connection.

First, check with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to determine whether they allow third-party DNS services. If they do, the next most likely explanation for failing the OpenDNS configuration tests is that your ISP uses a proxy server.

If your ISP uses proxy servers, you will not be able to take advantage of our Web-based features, but you will still benefit from a fast, secure and reliable Internet navigation experience.

If the verification results from below indicate you are using different DNS servers and you are confident that you have followed the OpenDNS configuration instructions, please contact your ISP to verify whether they allow third-party DNS.

In some cases, a work-around has been found successful by configuring both the router/modem and all computers on the network to use OpenDNS servers. For more information about how to configure OpenDNS on a computer, follow this link.