OpenDNS

[NathanE]

Got fed up with my ISP having such flakey DNS servers that seemed to just randomly reject like 1 in 10 requests. So I did something about it and told my router to point to OpenDNS instead.

Won't bore you all with "placebo this and placebo that" that but yeah it does seem more stable now

Also if you make an account on their website they have a few useful controls on there like filtering of certain categories of sites (pr0n for example).

If you don't sign up then they will redirect all invalid requests, like say "sdasdfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdfwerwerw.com" to their portal to provide search queries. But once signed up it's just a case of unticking that box. In fact I unticked basically everything except phishing and botnet protection.

If anyone is interested:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
208.67.222.220
208.67.220.222

^ don't let the optical illusion fool you, there really are 4 unique IP's there...

 

[NathanE]

Won't affect pings.

DNS is all about turning "www.foo.bar.com" into "123.123.123.123"

For what ever reason some ISPs (like mine) have totally crap DNS servers which are either slow or just randomly reject requests every now and then.

 

[NathanE]

oh ok, so it would therefore ignore the router's setting

still I can set it up using that, and use Tomato blocklists for some other sites

He could block outgoing WAN UDP port 53 traffic coming from the LAN on the router though. That would prevent PC's on the LAN using anything but the router as their DNS.

 

[NathanE]

I have used OpenDNS in the past but thought I'd give Be* DNS servers another go.

I wonder how many people in this thread are Be* users. It seems that whilst Be* is a popular ISP their DNS servers are not highly regarded?

When I used OpenDNS in the past, I never actually signed up. I will do this now and see what benefits I get and if it works better for me than just using their DNS servers.

I'm with Nildram. Whilst Nildram used to have absolutely stellar DNS servers back in the old days ever since they were purchased by Pipex they turned to pot. Presumably because they just decommissioned their own DNS servers and pushed the requests onto Pipex's. Then when Pipex got bought out by Tiscali I suspect that Pipex just pushed all their DNS requests onto Tiscali. So that's 3 "invisible hops" that's DNS requests with Nildram are having to jump through.

Been using OpenDNS for a few days now and web pages load much more reliably now without timing out and me needing to sigh and press F5...

 

[NathanE]

Go into the OpenDNS Dashboard.

Then select your Network.

Then click Settings on the Network.

Then click Advanced Settings on the left hand side.

Now untick the following options on the list:

- "Enable typo correction"
- "Enable filtering of .cm wildcard"
- "Apply my shortcuts to this network"
- "Enable OpenDNS proxy"

Then click Apply and wait a few minutes for the changes to take affect

 

[NathanE]

Won't matter. All of those IP addresses get routed to the same server in London anyway... unless there is an outage. In which case they'll probably get routed to their server in the USA east coast.

 

[NathanE]

This is what their server in London looks like:

Source: http://blog.opendns.com/category/london/

 

[NathanE]

That's six blades though, so I'm guessing they have three live/standby pairs? They won't need a san as local storage should be good enough for caching?

Whoosh To be honest I'm just an "armchair expert" when it comes to things like servers and sysadmin related stuff.

I would have thought their caching is just all held in RAM though. A few gigabytes of RAM can hold a lot of DNS entries I bet...

 

[NathanE]

You must have a dynamic IP address. In this case you need to install their little utility to keep your IP address updated on their servers.