
If you visit the same sites repeatedly, this will also be faster than any “DNS service”. Because you already have the IP’s in your cache. The whole DNS system could fail and you’d still be able to work using those sites. If a DNS provider such as OpenDNS fails, then only it users suffer.īy doing your own lookups, then for sites you have visited, you will have your own cache so you don’t need DNS for those sites. They are the authoritative source for lookups. If they fail, “the internet fails”… for *everyone*. Needless to say, the root and TLD servers are the most important servers on the internet. Then you will only be dependent on the root servers and TLD servers, and only for sites you’ve never visited (see below). Dump the cache to /etc/hosts periodically. The most reliable way to query DNS is to query the system yourself and keep your own cache. Your computer is quite capable of performing lookups by querying the DNS on its own. Neither option, whether paid DNs or “free” DNS gives you more reliability. telling someone else what sites you want to visit). If users knew how easy this whole business of DNS lookups is, they would undoubtedly not let someone else process their DNS lookups (i.e. And “Open” does not really mean anything in this context. The “reliability” (uptime) statement of the DNS service providers are misleading. Nothing wrong with any of this, but let’s not obscure the facts. When you use an external DNS service you are often making money for them… either paying them (paid service) or letting them collect from advertisers on mistyped URL’s (free service). 🥺 Was this helpful? Please add a comment to show your appreciation or feedback ↓ Join the nixCraft community via RSS Feed, Email Newsletter or follow on Twitter. He wrote more than 7k+ posts and helped numerous readers to master IT topics. Vivek Gite is the founder of nixCraft, the oldest running blog about Linux and open source. Is an alias for is an alias for has address 173.194.33.104

Update: Fri by Vivek: OpenDNS no longer redirects Google search queries though their servers: $ host 208.67.220.220 Thanks to ricko for pointing out OpenDNS issue in a chat room and elsewhere on the Internet. I strongly recommend running your own dns cache server along with your ISP forwarding nameservers. Their server always returns two IP address for my nameserver: I contacted their support about my problem but never got any reply. This encourages spam as you will not able to filter out spam queries using their dns servers. Here is a sample output:Ī has address 208.67.219.132 The DNS protocol requires that a query for a nonexistent domain must return the “NXDOMAIN” error response. They redirect web browser users or scripts accessing nonexistent domains to a page containing sponsored search results, ads, and a search form. OpenDNS is bad for serverĭon’t use them on your colocated server or vps server. You can also turn on or off this feature from OpenDNS control panel. Update: Dave has pointed out the reason why OpenDNS forwards google through their server. They may also do same for your email and other search engine.

They captures your search query data and they forwards to real domain. OpenDNS redirects all your Google search queries though their servers. All your search queries belongs to OpenDNS
