I just read a post on Lifehacker about OpenDNS, a free service that claims to speedup web surfing sessions and offer phishing protection. The diagram I’ve poached tries to explain why.
OpenDNS provides free DNS server addresses which you enter on your home router or within your computer’s network settings. The service caches the billions of DNS requests made by its users into a giant database on a distributed network, which turbocharges surfing for everyone who uses it.
At first I thought fantastic, and then once I’d paused and thought about it, I can’t see how OpenDNS’s servers could ever be faster than my ISP’s DNS servers which are only a couple of hops away, even if they are more efficient.
I’m also a bit sceptical of how genuine the claims of the service are, when an alternative explanation of why they launched the service is to sell their own ads when users type in the wrong url.
Does anyone use OpenDNS that can vouch for it?
More: OpenDNS
john as soon as i typed those numbers in to my settingd my negear has not been able to get a connection since… WHY?
john as soon as i typed those numbers in to my settingd my negear has not been able to get a connection since… WHY?
I does work as long as you don’t start changing any configuration settings..
I does work as long as you don’t start changing any configuration settings..
well did you type it in to the dns servers slot or ip. It goes into dns server textbox.
well did you type it in to the dns servers slot or ip. It goes into dns server textbox.
Step 1: Open Command Prompt (Start -> Run, Type cmd and press Enter).
Step 2: Type prompt $t – That changes the DOS prompt to the current time, we will need this to calculate the time it takes to execute any DOS command.
Step 3: Now run the following command where 208.67.222.222 is the standard IP address of OpenDNS server.
nslookup http://www.google.com 208.67.222.222
You can find the time OpenDNS takes to resolved the address by calculating the difference between the two timestamps.
Step 4: Run the same command again but replacing it with the IP Address of your local ISP’s DNS server – in my case, it is 125.22.47.125 (Airtel).
nslookup http://www.google.com 125.22.47.125
As you can see, the DNS server of the local ISP (Airtel) was slightly faster than OpenDNS in resolving the IP address of http://www.google.com – something good to know but the difference is insignificant and there are plenty of good reasons to continue using OpenDNS.
Update: You can execute all these commands in a batch file for more accurate results.
ver | time
nslookup http://www.google.com 208.67.222.222
ver | time
nslookup http://www.google.com 125.22.47.125
ver | time
This is based on a comment from Resolver – “I found that my ISP’s DNS server is much faster than OpenDNS… because at the moment there are only OpenDNS Server for Europe in London. I’ll wait until OpenDNS Server are in Germany.”