set DNS on laptop or router?

ringo747 · 21 Feb 2008 at 17:52

Hi guys,

Been looking over a lot of threads here in this forum about using opendns. I am with onetel and I think their DNS servers are crap. I discovered in my mac network preferences that I had overridden the DNS setting to 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2. I have no idea where these came from but I am guessing it is something similar to openDNS. The question is should I be setting this on my mac laptop or in my router?

I have found the following dns addresses for openDNS
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

AFAIK my router is set up to get DNS automatically from ISP. If they are crap then should I change them in the router? Would this provide better performance that setting them in the laptop and overriding the router settings?

Thanks

tolien · 21 Feb 2008 at 17:58

It doesn't make much odds where you change it.

ringo747 · 21 Feb 2008 at 18:02

ok cool - so there is no real disadvantage to having it set to override the router rather than setting it in the router itself?

I noticed the problem initially when I deleted the DNS server entries from my network config on the mac. It worked really fast at the start on sites I visit often but when trying unvisited sites sometimes it timed out and had to refresh a few times before the page would display. I am guessing this is purely down to the onetel DNS servers being ropey.

Is openDNS the recommended solution?

tolien · 21 Feb 2008 at 18:20

You're not "overriding the router". It's irrelevant whether you've got a router there or not because the machines will query the DNS server directly.

For ease of management it might be better to set the router to give out the different DNS server IPs rather than setting them manually, but that comes down to how much of a PITA it is to change them, how many machines you've got and how often you change them.

ringo747 · 21 Feb 2008 at 18:27

Ah right cheers for the info - I know nothing about this so 'overriding' was purely an assumption! Have changed this in the router and will see how it goes. I take it most people would recommend using openDNS or is it only if your ISP isn't up to it? Thanks for the help.

tolien · 21 Feb 2008 at 19:02

I use a mixture of my own, my ISP's and another ISP's. It depends on how good your ISP's are - the latency is almost certainly going to be less between you and a server within your ISP's network than out onto the internet.