[atlas] Tagging probes which are using the ISP's DNS server?

Hi Daniel,

On 06/10/2022 07:41, Daniel AJ Sokolov wrote:
> On this topic: Is there an Atlas-preferred setting for this? Should 
> the probe I host ideally use the ISP's DNS, or ideally a DNS from a 
> global player? Or ideally an academic/non-profit DNS?

Although you are completely free to choose whichever DNS server you 
think is best for your probe, we generally advise to use the same one 
that you assign to the rest of the network that the probe is connected to.

Cheers,
Johan ter Beest
RIPE Atlas Team

>
> BR
> Daniel AJ
>
>
>
> On 10/5/22 18:38, Max Grobecker wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> a few days ago I wanted to debug a name resolution problem of one of 
>> our domains.
>> For this reason, I wanted to test if probes inside a specific ASN are 
>> having difficulties to resolve a specific name (because only 
>> customers of this ISP were complaining).
>> This lead to very mixed results, mostly because some of the selected 
>> probes did queries to a public DNS service like Google, Quad9 and so on.
>> The problem existed only with the provider's DNS servers for some 
>> reason.
>>
>>
>> It did take some time to make a script which tried to filter out 
>> these probes, so I wondered if anyone else had the same use-case and 
>> problem.
>> Is there a way to automatically tag probes, which are (seemingly) 
>> using the ISP's own DNS servers, or, at least, not a well-known 
>> public service?
>> This could be done maybe by querying a special DNS name which returns 
>> the IP address from where the query was received (like 
>> "whoami.akamai.net").
>> By comparing the ASN of the probe and the ASN of the IP address 
>> returned by the DNS query, one could determine, if the ISP's servers 
>> are used.
>> This would also be true for people running their own recursor, but 
>> this could be filtered as well very easy.
>> If an ISP is using multiple ASN, this could be a problem. Maybe 
>> there's an easy solution for this as well.
>>
>> Probes which pass this test, could then be tagged with 
>> "DNS-using-ISP-server" or something like that and explicitly be 
>> selected for specific DNS resolution tests.
>>
>>
>> Greetings,
>>   Max
>>
>