OpenDNS – why did I not switch sooner?
Months ago I toyed with the idea to switch my DNS settings over and use OpenDNS. I’m not sure what stopped me from doing the switch, but it did not happen then.
A few hours ago I went into my main router and plugged in the OpenDNS servers as my two DNS hosts. The router distributes those addresses via DHCP to all computers in the house. As soon as the router was reconfigured, I refreshed my DHCP lease on my main computer and verified that I saw the new DNS servers.
Holy cow! Things are a lot snappier now! OpenDNS has a huge database of cached domain-name-to-IP translations, which means when I type something like “www.google.com” in the browser, I get an answer immediately from the first DNS request with no need to forward the “name” to the other DNS servers (which slows down the resolution and slows down the browsing experience).
On top of that OpenDNS also allows for shortcuts: for example, I assigned “kb” to “www.kahunaburger.com”, which allows me to just type “kb” in the browsers address-bar and I end up on the kahunaburger.com front-page. Yes, you can do this by modifying your hosts-file, but you have to do that for every single computer in the house independently. With OpenDNS I create the shortcut once and it immediately applies to all computers.
Nice job there OpenDNS-guys!
) Bavarian Bro
March 30th, 2008 at 1:11 am
I don’t see the difference with BIND
March 30th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Interesting – perhaps you started with a faster DNS connection to begin with? I can really see improvement in “initial returns” from the moment I typed in a URL until the first packets arrive. That seems to largely stem from the fact that OpenDNS has a lot of sites I hit already cached.
Cheers – Tobias
March 30th, 2008 at 8:09 am
Currently my DNS is so slow, that http://www.google.com/ resolves from the third try. With bind, 3, 4 and all next attempts are successful
March 30th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Did you configure you local named to cache results from forwarders? Meaning: once the result from the forwarder is received, your bind instance should cache it (to a disk file as well) with a long, long TTL. Even if you restart bind, named will pick up the cached information from the cache-file and you should see improvements over time. That’s essentially what OpenDNS does for you.
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/CachingNameserver has more information on this.
March 30th, 2008 at 9:54 am
No, I don’t save cached data to file nor do not change the TTL since my own http://laskavy.homeunix.net/ has very small TTL.