DNS Server and ISP Troubles
I'm beginning to see why people sometimes want to run their own DNS (Domain Name System) servers. My SBC DSL's DNS servers keep flaking out from time to time, more often lately. So when I'm surfing the Web it suddenly starts telling me that the site I'm trying to visit, such as Slashdot.org or Wireball.com, could not be found, and when I try to ping them, they report "unknown host ...".
I got sick of this today, so I reconfigured my Internet connection from SBC DSL's auto-configured Los Angeles DNS servers to a couple of OpenNIC's Public DNS Servers (one in New Orleans, LA and one in Tokyo, Japan), and since OpenNIC doesn't recognize .biz domain names (I gather), I put down SBC/Pacbell's Houston, TX primary DNS server as my third static DNS server. Using OpenNIC servers also lets me access such domains as .glue, which I could not access before because my SBC DNS servers do not support OpenDNS.
Of course, I could have tested it by trying to Telnet into my ISP's DNS servers on port 53, as detailed in this article. I did try it on the OpenNIC DNS servers, and it turns out that the San Francisco California and Phoenix Arizona servers were not responding at the time I did the test.
So far it seems to be working well - it's quite snappy, in fact. At first I had configured it without checking to see if the DNS servers were up, and it was taking a 2-4 seconds to resolve hostnames; I checked the DNS servers and it turned out that the first one I'd entered (in San Francisco) was not responding. Fixing that speeded it up greatly. Nice to have it working and not claiming that common sites do not exist (and since I'm using wildly different servers in different geographical regions, they're not as likely to go down all at the same time, unlike SBC Pacbell's local DNS servers).
From what little I know about DNS servers, it sounds like running one's own software/Linux- or FreeBSD-based DNS server (or cache/proxy) would be nice - you would know and be able to see what was going on, you could request name resolution from multiple servers if the first one failed to respond promptly, and have many more than just two or three DNS servers to choose from, so you weren't as subject to the whims of flaky servers, and even do statistical analysis on the different servers so that it tended to request name lookups from the fastest and most reliable servers more often. At least, I assume that's all possible. Yet another reason for me to learn Linux more thoroughly.
I got sick of this today, so I reconfigured my Internet connection from SBC DSL's auto-configured Los Angeles DNS servers to a couple of OpenNIC's Public DNS Servers (one in New Orleans, LA and one in Tokyo, Japan), and since OpenNIC doesn't recognize .biz domain names (I gather), I put down SBC/Pacbell's Houston, TX primary DNS server as my third static DNS server. Using OpenNIC servers also lets me access such domains as .glue, which I could not access before because my SBC DNS servers do not support OpenDNS.
Of course, I could have tested it by trying to Telnet into my ISP's DNS servers on port 53, as detailed in this article. I did try it on the OpenNIC DNS servers, and it turns out that the San Francisco California and Phoenix Arizona servers were not responding at the time I did the test.
So far it seems to be working well - it's quite snappy, in fact. At first I had configured it without checking to see if the DNS servers were up, and it was taking a 2-4 seconds to resolve hostnames; I checked the DNS servers and it turned out that the first one I'd entered (in San Francisco) was not responding. Fixing that speeded it up greatly. Nice to have it working and not claiming that common sites do not exist (and since I'm using wildly different servers in different geographical regions, they're not as likely to go down all at the same time, unlike SBC Pacbell's local DNS servers).
From what little I know about DNS servers, it sounds like running one's own software/Linux- or FreeBSD-based DNS server (or cache/proxy) would be nice - you would know and be able to see what was going on, you could request name resolution from multiple servers if the first one failed to respond promptly, and have many more than just two or three DNS servers to choose from, so you weren't as subject to the whims of flaky servers, and even do statistical analysis on the different servers so that it tended to request name lookups from the fastest and most reliable servers more often. At least, I assume that's all possible. Yet another reason for me to learn Linux more thoroughly.
posted by Wireball at 2:05 PM
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