Which DNS

NathanE said:
Says who? :confused: They've been up and running for, what, a couple weeks now?

In the world of the Internet they've still got several years worth of proving to do if they really want to be seen as fast and reliable.
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LOL I'm not waiting several years until someone says they're "proven".

For me they're fast and reliable now.:)
 
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NathanE said:
Says who? :confused: They've been up and running for, what, a couple weeks now?

In the world of the Internet they've still got several years worth of proving to do if they really want to be seen as fast and reliable.
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To be honest all these services are anycasted, you really need to be stupid as hell to screw that up once it's working. Google have very few outages on gmail, which is orders of magnitude more complex than this. If you can't run an anycasted DNS service with 100% uptime you're in the wrong business...
 
bigredshark said:
I'll just add my usual condemnation of open DNS to this thread as well, I will never ever use a DNS provider which hijacks nxdomain (yes I know you can turn it off, but by default they're breaking part of the DNS specification for commercial gain which is just hideous stuff and I will not in any way be part of encouraging it).

I'd much prefer google logging my DNS requests (and again I'll point out that google's privacy policy is at least openly available and fairly transparent) to open DNS. That said, I have a decent ISP with decent name servers which don't analyse requests, don't break the DNS specification and are on net so consistently faster than alternatives. If I didn't I'd likely have stuffed a cacheing server on one of my VPS's or something to use as a primary.
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So you'd rather see a page cannot be displayed, after a prolonged timeout period than probably the correct page from a search result? It's not as if they're highjacking dns entries in place of proper valid records. Perhaps you don't visit webpages which aren't also w3c certified?

I think in general people are fair too paranoid about things that really don't matter. Advertising is here, its not going anywhere soon. If I'm going to be subjected to advertising I'd much rather it was aimed directly at me, for products / services I'd be much more interested in than some f'ing planty liners.

I use in total 5 DNS servers, my internal one which forwards to open DNS and virgin media.
 
Had issues with o2's servers recently so started using Google and had no problems.

To the paranoid people - do you really think anyone at Google cares what sites you browse?
 
http://code.google.com/p/namebench/

Worked well for me, I'm on an ADSL-Max Easynet reseller and found BT's and Google's servers much faster on average (almost 60ms), with lower maximum respose times than the defaults.

Gone with BT-61 primary and Googles 8.8.8.8 as backup.

I'm another one in the "so what?" camp about google. Firstly dynamic IP's make logging the results impractical, and secondly if i'm going to see adverts anyway they may as well be relevent to my interests. As long as it's unobstructive, I have no problem with Advertising.
 
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ecksmen said:
So you'd rather see a page cannot be displayed, after a prolonged timeout period than probably the correct page from a search result? It's not as if they're highjacking dns entries in place of proper valid records. Perhaps you don't visit webpages which aren't also w3c certified?
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DNS isn't just used for browsing you know? It potentially breaks multiple apps who's only crime to assume DNS will respond in the way the specification says it will. And in that particular case, yes I would because the hijacking breaks several things, particularly annoying, if I mistype an address and get no response then the browser forgets all about it, if I mistype an address with nx domain broken then because it returns a webpage the typo is cached and attempts to autocomplete from that point on. That's a pain.

And actually, they have in the past at least hijacked valid lookups to google (still giving you google but through their proxy). Paul Vixie (the guy who wrote bind), has written several pieces, including one titled 'what DNS isn't' which explain in some detail his objections to this.

Fact is, they're messing about with it in an attempt to make money from advertising. It's not what DNS was designed for and it's just opportunistic profiteering. I've no time for it or any of the companies involved.

I'm also curious why your forwarding your internal DNS servers to openDNS and virgin media? What's the point. Just give it the root servers file, why would you forward??
 
bigredshark said:
I'm also curious why your forwarding your internal DNS servers to openDNS and virgin media? What's the point. Just give it the root servers file, why would you forward??
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Quite. The amout of times I see this configured in business environments makes me cringe.
 
I completely agree with you bigredshark in this, I think that if a domain doesn't exist then nothing should happen. If I make a mistake when typing the URL I don't need someone to give me a list of links to similar websites or a search engine filled with ads, if nothing exists then nothing should be given.

It's a shame that my ISP virgin media does this with its DNS servers. They are the fastest for me so I still use them as thankfully once you encounter a non-existant domain you can opt-out which I have. I shouldn't have to opt-out in the first place, but until another DNS can match the speed of VM, I think I will stick with it.
 
Morfik said:
do you really think anyone at Google cares what sites you browse?
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Yes, yes they do... Google are not a traditional technology company, they are an advertising company, that's where they make their billions of $ each year. They just give away free technology as a way to gather data and make $ by selling targeted advertising.

Nothing necessarily wrong with that as long as you know it's happening and are happy for them to gather that data from you.
 
Athanor said:
Yes, yes they do... Google are not a traditional technology company, they are an advertising company, that's where they make their billions of $ each year. They just give away free technology as a way to gather data and make $ by selling targeted advertising.

Nothing necessarily wrong with that as long as you know it's happening and are happy for them to gather that data from you.
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That's exactly true, but his point is, in a subtle way, also true. Nobody at google cares what you look at, all they care about is that on balance they can accurately target adds at users. They don't care what you look at, don't care what the adverts are for and have no real interest in who person x is (or even being able to identify them later) as long as they can serve ads which are relevant to them so their advertisers will continue to pay them.

People who're moaning about google and privacy are missing something, there are far greater threats to privacy particularly from government, where, unlike with google, you don't have the choice to opt out and use someone else.
 
Athanor said:
Yes, yes they do... Google are not a traditional technology company, they are an advertising company, that's where they make their billions of $ each year. They just give away free technology as a way to gather data and make $ by selling targeted advertising.

Nothing necessarily wrong with that as long as you know it's happening and are happy for them to gather that data from you.
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Yes, but so what if a computer algorithm targets me for advertising based on what I browse, not the end of the world is it? In fact it might tempt me to turn off Adblock if there's actually adverts for things I might want. No person is ever going to delve into my records to have a nosey round are they?

If people are that paranoid, I take it they don't own a Tesco Clubcard, Boots Advantage Card, Oyster card etc and pay for everything in cash whilst wearing a tin foil hat...
 
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