Router's Primary and Secondary DNS

B

beyonddc

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 25, 2002
Messages
417
Hi All,

I just started playing with my router's settings, and one option is to set the primary and secondary DNS.

Up until now, I have been using whatever my ISP is providing. I now switched to OpenDNS. I set the primary and secondary DNS as whatever specified from the OpenDNS website.
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

My questions are

1) Does people typically set their secondary DNS to some other provider such as the new Google Public DNS so that in case one service provider cannot resolve an address, the other service provider would.

2) Why we need a primary and secondary DNS?

Thanks for reading my post! :cool:
 
I use opendns for both primary and secondary.

The goal when it comes to networks & servers is to keep them up. If the primary is not available, the secondary would be.
 
Places like OpenDNS and others offer some control over DNS requests that may help block malicious sites

Honestly I've never had a problem with Time Warner's DNS service.. (in 8 years I've had them)
 
Thanks for the response. The reason why I asked whether to use OpenDNS as primary and other DNS provider as secondary is that I think there's certain sites I no longer able to access.

For example, the last two days, I have been trying to get access to www.geeks.com

Is that site down or OpenDNS is not able resolve it?
 
beyonddc said:
Thanks for the response. The reason why I asked whether to use OpenDNS as primary and other DNS provider as secondary is that I think there's certain sites I no longer able to access.

For example, the last two days, I have been trying to get access to www.geeks.com

Is that site down or OpenDNS is not able resolve it?
Click to expand...

that site is down lol
 
beyonddc said:
Thanks for the response. The reason why I asked whether to use OpenDNS as primary and other DNS provider as secondary is that I think there's certain sites I no longer able to access.

For example, the last two days, I have been trying to get access to www.geeks.com

Is that site down or OpenDNS is not able resolve it?
Click to expand...

IntelOwnz said:
that site is down lol
Click to expand...

I am on it just fine?

Looks like they are having an end of year liquidation sale.
 
My question would be why not just use your service provider's DNS? It's usually the closest one from a routing perspective anyway. As long as it isn't some mom and pop ISP it will probably never go down. Firewalls and anti-virus protect you from malicious sites plus you can always search for one of those blacklists and stick it in your hosts file to redirect certain sites to "127.0.0.1" without having to use use OpenDNS.

I'd be more worried using some random person's DNS than my service provider's.
 
beyonddc said:
Hi All,

I just started playing with my router's settings, and one option is to set the primary and secondary DNS.

Up until now, I have been using whatever my ISP is providing. I now switched to OpenDNS. I set the primary and secondary DNS as whatever specified from the OpenDNS website.
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

My questions are

1) Does people typically set their secondary DNS to some other provider such as the new Google Public DNS so that in case one service provider cannot resolve an address, the other service provider would.

2) Why we need a primary and secondary DNS?

Thanks for reading my post! :cool:
Click to expand...

Just to clarify a common misperception on DNS servers:

  1. If the primary DNS server cannot resolve a name, it does NOT query the secondary DNS server. The primary server would initiate an iterative + recursive query process. Google thesse terms for the full query process
  2. The secondary DNS server is only used when the primary is either too busy, or is down
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top