I’ve gotten tired of Road Runner’s DNS redirection/hijacking service which I opt out of yet it keeps coming back.  I decided to do some DNS benchmarking, comparing my assigned ISP name servers against publicly provided DNS such as Google.   The results were very surprising.  It turns out I have less latency and hops reaching some of the publicly available DNS servers instead of those provided by my ISP (the servers actually resolve lookups faster).

Here’s what I did:

  1. Download and run DNS Benchmark (Windows or Wine): http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm
  2. Add your ISP assigned DNS servers into the DNS benchmark tool for comparison (Windows: ipconfig /all  Linux: cat /etc/resolv.conf)
  3. Load any additional public DNS servers into the tool: publicly provided DNS
  4. If public DNS is faster, configure your machine for hardcoded DNS (not to pickup from DHCP).

Coincidentally, Symantec has just released their own version of a public DNS that provides malware filtering.  You can read The H article here.  Symantec’s “secure” DNS servers are 198.153.192.1 and 198.153.194.1

Tags: ,