At Work On a Mac » Networking http://www.mac2work.com 2 Geeks On Macs, Gadgets, Games and Life... Thu, 16 Dec 2010 11:08:56 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 Tips : Finding The Fastest DNS Servers http://www.mac2work.com/2009/12/16/tips-finding-the-fastest-dns-servers/ http://www.mac2work.com/2009/12/16/tips-finding-the-fastest-dns-servers/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:00:56 +0000 Jonathan Grenier http://www.mac2work.com/?p=239 Google recently came up with their own public DNS servers to “speed up the web” even more (see my analysis of their strategy and my initial impressions on my blog here). What they do is they give you a single IP address that’s routed to a Google DNS server near you and they heavily cache all the results. Basically, it should speed up your web browsing.

Of course, Google’s service is not the only one. You can also try the well-known OpenDNS or the quite fast UltraDNS to see which one is better but it can be hard to determine which one is really faster.

The answer is surprisingly easy to find thanks to a free, open source tool from a Google employee (Gotta love those “20% projects”). NameBench is a little tool that will run tests on a random set of sites using public DNS servers and local servers (your ISP, others nearby etc.). It takes about 5 minutes to run and will tell you what DNS servers you should be using.

Quick, Easy and Free. That’s my kind of solution!

]]> http://www.mac2work.com/2009/12/16/tips-finding-the-fastest-dns-servers/feed/ 0 OpenDNS http://www.mac2work.com/2007/12/19/opendns/ http://www.mac2work.com/2007/12/19/opendns/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:03:31 +0000 François Reeves http://www.mac2work.com/2007/12/19/opendns/ We invest a lot in hardware, network gear and connection to the Internet but we often leave out one essential aspect of browsing: domain name resolution. I recommend that you use OpenDNS to gain more control over an essential part of your network. It’s very easy to set-up and creating a free account will allow you to configure settings for phishing prevention, typo correction and browsing statistics. OpenDNS caches a lot of Internet domain names so accessing them is much faster. The more you use the service, the more your favourite places are cached. Now if someone could get me fiber optics, we’d be off to the races.

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