Google today launched a new, free DNS service—called Google Public DNS—aimed at making your web browsing experience even faster. Here’s how it works:
We’ve written many times about the benefits of pointing your router to OpenDNS instead of your ISP’s ad-shoving re-direct service. OpenDNS now offers a $US10-per-year Deluxe version that offers whitelist-only surfing, customised block pages, and one year of surfing stats.
Yesterday we offered up a guide to protecting your Windows PC from the Conficker worm, set to perhaps start doing something this week. Free net service OpenDNS is another option for anyone concerned about today’s not-so-funny happening.
Chrome developers describe one of the features that makes the browser speedier: DNS pre-fetching. When you visit a web page in Chrome, it looks up the IP address of all the links on page before you click on them, in some cases saving you up to a second in DNS-resolution latency time by doing the look-ups preemptively. Type about:histograms/DNS.PrefetchFoundName and about:dns into the address bar to check out your pre-fetch time savings in Chrome. Another way to speed up DNS resolution is to start using the free OpenDNS service.
Tech site Webmonkey advises users not sure whether or not their DNS servers are patched against a recently discovered vulnerability to switch to the excellent, free DNS service, OpenDNS. Test your DNS server for the vulnerability here and get Webmonkey’s instructions for setting up OpenDNS . (We love OpenDNS so much it was one of our best apps of 2006.)
If you’ve found yourself hitting DNS errors or 404 pages in your browser but you know your net connection is working fine, it might be time to flush and restart Windows’ DNS cache. The How-To Geek shows how to do this in three command line entries, although you might only need the first to see results. After launching a command prompt as an administrator and closing down Firefox (which has its own DNS cache), enter the following: ipconfig /flushdnsnet stop dnscachenet start dnscache
The Geek also shows you how to restart the service in Windows XP or Vista’s DNS service from the graphical services menu.
Troubleshoot Browsing Issues by Reloading the DNS Client Cache in Vista [The How-To Geek]
