The heart of the Internet is its Domain Name System, the thing that converts www.blahblahblah.com to a real ip address.
When this process is slow, or worse, broken — strange behaviors happen, from undeliverable mail, to web sites appearing to be down for some people and not for others, …you know, Twilight Zone stuff.
To improve performance, many people use Linux to host their own DNS server. Effectively, a local DNS can cache lookups so one doesn’t have to keep hitting one’s ISP or the Intenet proper for domain name resolution. But this doesn’t solve the problem when the data itself is broken, you make a typo, or worse yet — evil hackers are deliberately doing bad things to the DNS entries or are trying to lure you to bad sites by playing tricks with the domain names, like using Unicode with similar glyphs.
Enter in OpenDNS, a free DNS server that provides safer and faster lookups.
I recently switched to it a while back in an experiment, and I have to say, they deliver.
I’ve been pleased by the speed at which my machine operates, I’ve made dumb typos and its corrected them, and I’ve had a few occasions where I’ve gone so far off the mark that OpenDNS will return me some really useful information in the “hey, couldn’t find what you were looking for, how about some of these options?”
Ok- wait, how does a domain name to ip address lookup make a recommendation? Very cleverly, that’s how.
When I enter in a URL that is sooooo bad, instead of reporting back Host Not Found, it returns the IP address of one of it’s own servers, that then parses the URL, and returns a web page with the content it thinks I might be looking for. I get a page of links, often to the site I meant, or to other sites that have useful information. In short: wow.
Configuring OpenDNS is trivial. Simply choose your operating system and follow the easy, and highly pictorial, directions. Instantly you’ll start seeing performance improvements.
Walt gives OpenDNS a Thumbs Up!