So here’s a kind of weird thing I cannot figure out: using OpenDNS on our home router killed my corporate VPN.
I’ve been a fan of OpenDNS for some time. I do think it’s faster than Comcast’s DNS servers and it is certainly more secure. It’s also pretty handy when you just have a typo in a domain name, which I do often. I’ve only ran into one issue where I couldn’t get to a site I was actually trying to visit (and that is weird — just like a part of the internet you know should be there is gone).
Until today.
I added the OpenDNS servers on my Apple Airport Base Station. It rebooted quickly and everything seemed normal. My Windows machine was able to reconnect to the VPN with no trouble. However, I could not connect to the Microsoft Exchange server nor the Office Communicator server. The entire rest of the internet worked just fine, just those two (highly critical) items did not work at all.
I should note that I was able to connect to the Exchange server via my iPhone or a web browser, so it wasn’t down during this time. Further, resetting the DNS entries on my router corrected the problem almost instantly.
I really fail to see how the DNS server could affect connecting to something over a VPN, but it clearly has some issue. So, I’m stuck with Comcasts slow (and possibly unsafe) DNS servers for now. But, at least I have a VPN!