Ever considered changing your DNS settings?

j.smith1981

Allot of people won't have thought about this but there's allot of free services out there that will offer you safer surfing, I don't mean for adults with children that want to block offensive content but for the average user that doesn't want malicious sites.

There is an application that claims to check your internal hardware drives for viruses and malware, when actually it's a piece of malware in itself.

Comodo's DNS servers here's the setup guides (I use their firewall and AV myself, think though it's quite confusing with being able to create stealth zones for your firewall, it's rated as the best for entirely free fully functioning firewall and AV), their guide for their DNS is here

I mean mine where 194.168.4.100 and 194.168.8.100, changed when I moved into my flat because I had to make an account of my own, but I have never used Virgins DNS's again and never come across any problems, they have caching enabled too so means you get quicker page deliveries, depending on your setups though and your connection speeds.

GunJack

OpenDNS is probably the best out there, and configurable too

esuhl

The UI of Comodo's firewall is really badly designed and when I installed it using default settins and tested it, it consistently failed leak tests. But it can be set up to work so (for want of a better software firewall) I too use it on my Windows installations.

It's important to be able to trust the DNS servers that you're using as they could direct your legitimate request for, say, google.com to the IP address of a server that hosts malicious content.

Having said that, there are a couple of DNS benchmarking tools I've used that might help anyone wanting to speed up DNS resolution: GRC's imaginatively named DNS Benchmark and Google's slightly more creative namebench.

John_Gray

esuhl wrote: »

Having said that, there are a couple of DNS benchmarking tools I've used that might help anyone wanting to speed up DNS resolution: GRC's imaginatively named DNS Benchmark and Google's slightly more creative namebench.

Useful tools, and if you use them every so often you may find that sometimes the servers you had chosen as 'the fastest' are somewhat lower down the rankings than they were last time. Things change...

fwor

In case this thread gets to be seen as a universal recommendation to use a DNS other than the one your ISP provides, here are some reasons why you should not:

1. A third party DNS will ~always~ be further away from you than your ISP's servers, and will involve more network hops. If the whole network is running normally you won't notice the extra delay, but if there are problems, you may.

2. You are paying for the ISP's DNS as part of your broadband service, and you have a right to expect it to work properly. You are not paying a third party anything, so if the quality declines, that's tough.

3. Your ISP has complete information to enable it to size its DNS correctly - because traffic comes entirely from its own customers. A third party does not, and if it gets sizing wrong, there can be a long delay before that can be put right.

An alternative to choosing a different DNS: if your ISP cannot provide consistently good DNS response, consider changing to another ISP.

Darksun

I use Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4), started after my ISP introduced some silly DNS hijacking experiment. I've found Google's DNS to be stable and quick, some other free DNS providers I've found that offer lots of extra features have sometimes been slower and prone to outages

debitcardmayhem

fwor wrote: »

In case this thread gets to be seen as a universal recommendation to use a DNS other than the one your ISP provides, here are some reasons why you should not:

1. A third party DNS will ~always~ be further away from you than your ISP's servers, and will involve more network hops. If the whole network is running normally you won't notice the extra delay, but if there are problems, you may.

2. You are paying for the ISP's DNS as part of your broadband service, and you have a right to expect it to work properly. You are not paying a third party anything, so if the quality declines, that's tough.

3. Your ISP has complete information to enable it to size its DNS correctly - because traffic comes entirely from its own customers. A third party does not, and if it gets sizing wrong, there can be a long delay before that can be put right.

An alternative to choosing a different DNS: if your ISP cannot provide consistently good DNS response, consider changing to another ISP.

Yep go for a slower ISP just to speed up your DNS . No create you own hosts file including your most used sites (useful for stopping malware too) and set the primary to your ISP and secondary to google / opendns / whatever-else-you-care-for or vice-versa. Just my advice of course

mart44

I have a utility insatalled called 'DNS Jumper' that will look for the fastest DNS servers. It also provides a quick way of switching between them. It's surprising how many servers there are and how the speed varies between them. I wouldn't use just any but do like to use one that provides a bad site filtering service. The ISP's own servers don't offer this.

ClearCloud DNS was was the server of choice before it stopped operating in September. Now I use Norton DNS for blocking. It has stepped in and blocked sites on a couple of occasions. I haven't noticed any slowing down of sites but even if it turns out not to be the fastest service, I'm willing to sacrifice speed for the extra layer of security.

mr_fishbulb

Darksun wrote: »

I use Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4), started after my ISP introduced some silly DNS hijacking experiment. I've found Google's DNS to be stable and quick, some other free DNS providers I've found that offer lots of extra features have sometimes been slower and prone to outages

I have Comodo's DNS servers as 1&2, then Google as 3&4 in case the Comodo ones go down.

j.smith1981

I have not really seen much of a difference in speed of my DNS by changing to googles Domain Servers, I mean I have used them as a first option and then going to Comodo's and lastly my ISPs, there's quite a few you can opt for when using pfSense (which has a DNS forward caching service built in).

Though I am using pfSense on a really old node and that's my caching server so that could have implications (I would have thought so) on speed.

Interesting replies though, will definately look at the other ones available.

somersethillbilly

mart44 wrote: »

ClearCloud DNS was was the server of choice before it stopped operating in September. Now I use Norton DNS for blocking. It has stepped in and blocked sites on a couple of occasions. I haven't noticed any slowing down of sites but even if it turns out not to be the fastest service, I'm willing to sacrifice speed for the extra layer of security.

I did exactly the same as you when ClearCloud ceased, Very happy with Norton DNS too. I have also put Norton DNS on a friend's router for him as his ISP's (Orange) DNS servers where truly awful.