Posts Tagged ‘dns’

Free: Namebench DNS Benchmarking Tool

March 17th, 2010

It’s common practice to use the DNS provided by whoever your ISP is to resolve names on the Internet, but in some cases the ISP’s fail optimize or maintain their DNS server(allocate resources) resulting in poor performance.

Fortunately, a large number of alternative public DNS providers exists, the question is ‘Which one do I use ?‘. The answer to this question can be provided by Namebench a free and open source DNS benchmarking tool.

Namebech does not measure long term reliability.

Description from the Namebech home page

Try out namebench. It hunts down the fastest DNS servers available for your computer to use. namebench runs a fair and thorough benchmark using your web browser history, tcpdump output, or standardized datasets in order to provide an individualized recommendation. namebench is completely free and does not modify your system in any way. This project began as a 20% project at Google.

The whole DNS benchmarking test will be done for you automatically, actually all the user has to do is Download > Extract > Run Namebench and click on Start Benchmark . Wait four to five minutes for the test to be completed, when done Namebench will present you with the results by opening a window on your browser.

Hopefully, the results will help you make an informed decision on whether you should change DNS provider at all.

Namebench Home Page http://code.google.com/p/namebench/

No comments »

Posted in Article

Tags:

Google Public DNS

December 3rd, 2009

Google_Internet_Society

Google effort to speed up the web Google now includes its own Public DNS as an alternative to ISP provided servers.

The service follows the DNS Standards set forth by the Internet community and is not intended to compete with OpenDNS which provides filtering and many other features, but also redirects typos to ad sponsored pages. Actually Google joins the ranks of DNS providers such as Level 3 that provide public DNS access.

As stated by Prem Ramaswami

Google Public DNS follows the DNS Standards set forth by the Internet
community which means we do not block, filter, or redirect DNS responses.
These actions most probably belong on the client side rather than the
protocol side.

Google Public DNS IPs

8.8.8.8  
8.8.4.4

No comments »

Posted in News

Tags:

List of public DNS servers

March 6th, 2009

Domain name resolution is a necessity, some providers are better than others that’s the reason why I keep a list of public DNS servers mostly for testing. The list includes the IP addresses for two public DNS providers (Level3 Communications and OpenDNS), use their services at your own discretion.

Level 3 Communications

4.2.2.1
4.2.2.2
4.2.2.3
4.2.2.4
4.2.2.5
4.2.2.6

Google DNS

  8.8.8.8
  8.8.4.4

OpenDNS

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

There are more public DNS providers, but I rarely use them.

3 comments »

Posted in Article

Tags:

Assign A Static IP On CentOS With A Working DNS Configuration

October 9th, 2008

First we need to become in order to issue the “setup” command.

[root@localhost ~]# setup

A text configuration page will appear, choose “Network configuration”.

Choose the intended interface that will be assigned the static IP.

Remove the star in “Use DHCP” option and start assigning the IP address, Netmask and Gateway address. After you are done choose “OK”.

After making the changes don’t forget to choose Quit instead of Cancel otherwise the changes will not be implemented.

The previous instruction should give you a working machine with a static IP, the only problem is that there is no working DNS to reach other domains in the Internet. If you try to ping Google.com you will get an error, however if you Ping one of the many IP’s Google owns like 72.14.207.99 you will have successful packer transmission. To solve this issue we need to add DNS entry’s to the /etc/resolv.conf file.

Open /etc/resolv.conf with your favorite text editor and add the IP addresses for your DNS servers. In this example I added the IP addresses that belong to the OpenDNS service.

nameserver  208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Another option is to add the IP address of your gateway (Router) and have it act as the intermediate for your ISP DNS servers.

Do not forget to restart your network service or just reboot the entire machine.

1 comment »

Posted in Article

Tags: