Thursday, November 1, 2018

Here's to you Pitney Bowes?!? Requiring plain text DNS to 8.8.8.8 is a deal breaker!!! Or, TIL PB sucks; Or, isn't there an RFC for that?

Did you know that recent Pitney Bowes machines require DNS to 8.8.8.8 to succeed? If the request doesn't succeed the device drops the connection, wired or wireless.... Here's the kicker, wait for it... That behavior persists EVEN WHEN THE DEVICE IS STATICALLY ASSIGNED A DIFFERENT DNS SERVER (dynamic too)....

This is dumb behavior! If I assign a device a different DNS server it is because I know something else isn't going to work the way I want it too (security) or the way it needs to (lack of functionality). This is an enterprise environment with multiple locations, this is not the wild fucking west! Its the modern railroad and all of its politics to boot, don't drop your device on our network and tell us how to run shit.

If you want to simplify troubleshooting for your Help Desk then ship the device with an LTE modem by default. Then it won't touch my network and we don't have discuss anything further. You'll probably save money in the end anyway, if not tack on a service fee; we'd pay 10.00/mo/device so we didn't have to troubleshoot.

If you absolutely need to use unsecured 8.8.8.8 DNS to verify connectivity, then force 8.8.8.8 as a DNS server. If you can't do that then, take a hint from Microsoft; If your request fails but everything else works, warn the user (looking at you msftconnecttest.com) but don't drop the connection - that's how you get kicked off the network.



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