First heard last week, and apparently a known issue, and brought to our attention separately by Lane this morning…
Some students, on their Macs, will encounter an issue, where, if they are connected to our wireless networks (UTC or UTC-Secure), will not be able to access UTC websites hosted by our on-campus servers. OU Campus is one of those.
Via FootPrints, this is the response from Campus IT:
“These individuals most likely need to visit us in 105 Pfeiffer Hall for troubleshooting. We have seen this before and the problem is usually caused by manually configured DNS settings on the computer. (usually 8.8.4.4 or 8.8.8.8, for Google) The student who switched to Bootcamp did not have these settings changed in Windows, so it worked fine. Some antivirus programs have a ‘Secure DNS’ setting which conflict with accessing the UTC website. If you get additional reports, feel free to send them to us for troubleshooting.”
I’m asking a follow-up to Networking for further clarification.
Further info:
“What the help desk described to you is exactly what’s happening. It’s not just a problem that affects Macs, it will affect any networked device. If a computer is not using our local DNS servers, sites hosted on campus will not load. There’s nothing we can do about that other than to fix the configuration on their machines.
For example, if you look up http://www.utc.edu on campus you get 172.27.14.19. If you look up http://www.utc.edu from off campus you get 150.182.140.86. The later address will not load if you are already on the campus network as that address only really exists external to our network. Using non-UTC DNS severs will get you the 150.182.140.86 result and therefore not load.
We hand out the proper DNS servers through DHCP when machines connect to the network. However, anyone that has manually overridden the DNS server settings or is running “security” software that overrides that for them will break their connections to anything on campus while they are also on campus. For the most part, people don’t change those settings. Changing the DNS server settings does not provide any real security gains, but some people tend to think it does.
As we move further into IPv6, this will start dwindling. Until then, we have to make sure users do not override DNS server settings. “