DNS opinion requested

insane

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 17, 2006
Messages
83
This past week, my Comcast internet was really slow. I called Comcast and their tests show that my internet is just fine and that they won’t do anything to fix it. I was pissed but I managed to change a few configurations by running a few network commands in the CMD window which helped me increase my speed.

Now that I’m at a point of attempting to resolve this problem once and for all, I believe that Comcast DNS server might have been under load and caused a lag. I want to switch to an alternative DNS server. I have been looking at a few alternative DNS services such as openDNS and google public DNS. I heard that openDNS offers the fastest speed.

Which one do you guys recommend?

Also for configuration, I understand if I configure DNS to one of the services listed above on my router (e1200), all my devices connected to the router will use that service. Out of curiosity, if one my computers were to be setup for another DNS, say google public DNS while my router is setup for a different service such as openDNS, would my configured computer use google public DNS?

This will be useful to know for testing purposes so I can ping different servers ‘-t’ times.

Thanks
 
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Which one do you guys recommend?

I use 8.8.8.8 which is Google's for my primary DNS. It has worked perfectly for me.

I understand if I configure DNS to one of the services listed above on my router (e1200), all my devices connected to the router will use that service.
Only if your DHCP server is set to pass along the DNS information, which is usually the case, but not all the time. You can have your DHCP hosts inherit DNS information from the DHCP server.

Out of curiosity, if one my computers were to be setup for another DNS, say google public DNS while my router is setup for a different service such as openDNS, would my configured computer use google public DNS?

Yes if you static a DNS server into your IP configuration on a host machine, it will explicitly use it.
 
I use 8.8.8.8 which is Google's for my primary DNS. It has worked perfectly for me.


Only if your DHCP server is set to pass along the DNS information, which is usually the case, but not all the time. You can have your DHCP hosts inherit DNS information from the DHCP server.



Yes if you static a DNS server into your IP configuration on a host machine, it will explicitly use it.
Awesome, that cleared things up. I'll be testing different DNS services tonight.
 
Another alternative are the DynDNS Internet Guide servers at 216.146.35.35 and 216.146.36.36.

Doing digs directly against google, opendns, and dyndns's servers all returned in approximately 45ms average query latency.
 
OpenDNS +1

Google DNS +1

Use them both as primary / secondary. There's simply no reason to rely on your ISP to do DNS for you, they are generally overloaded, and even if they aren't, some of them do redirection on pages back to random searches sponsored by them, and that makes me a sad panda
 
This is surprising, according to namebench, Comcast has the fastest DNS. Due to reliability, I think I'll stick with openDNS because I don't want to go through another week of slow internet if Comcast's DNS was the cause.



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What problems were you experiencing? Switching DNS providers will not help with throughput and ping times, as you mentioned above.
 
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