[ubuntu-za] DNS Server

[Soren Aalto]

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Andre Hugo <cortexpeterpan at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I have recently changed my DNS server settings to Google DNS 8.8.8.8 and
> 8.8.4.4 the speed increase in browsing was noticeable in Chrome and Firefox.
>
> What do you guys think about Google DNS or any other DNS like Open DNS
> compared to the default of your ISP. Was it a good move or not? What DNS are
> you using?
>

Well...there's a couple things at play here.

Use mtr to see how far away GoogleDNS and OpenDNS are from you.

Your ISPs DNS *should* be closer in terms of RTT.  However, I've noticed
that the DNS proxy on a lot of the ADSL WiFi routers out there is borked
in a strange way -- it will send back replies from an unexpected UDP port.

This seems to be ok for some Windows boxes (although why it works at
all I can't fathom), but cause my Ubuntu laptop to take *forever* to do
resolves.  I actually put Telkom's DNS resolver in my resolv.conf (the
very same one that the DSL router is using), and that speeds things up
hugely, e.g.:

root at soren-laptop:/etc# cat resolv.conf
# Generated by NetworkManager
nameserver 196.43.50.190
nameserver 10.0.0.2

The other slightly dangerous thing --- if you use a far away resolver,
it breaks the geolocation of a lot of the CDNs out there.  For e.g.,
if you use openDNS, then you are sending all your resolver queries
to...looks like Dallas...but this means that when you go to
http://mail.google.com/, openDNS will return you the google cache
*closest to the openDNS resolver*.  I've noticed that gmail get much
flakier if you end up connecting to a far away google cache rather
than the one in SA.

-- 
Soren Aalto
Director: ICT
University of Zululand
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