MEPIS Community Forum

I run Mepis 8 / KDE 3.5 / Firefox 3.5

Over recent weeks I've been unable to access Distrowatch.com and on research have changed my Netgear router's Auto DNS to Google primary / secondary DNS settings and can now access Distrowatch.

I'm in the UK and my ISP is Talktalk. I also tried Talktalk primary / secondary DNS settings - no go for Distrowatch.

Can I assume Google primary / secondary DNS will be as fast as any for the UK?

Thanks

Should be. If not better. ISP provided DNS can be a problem. Just yesterday we had a problem with email sent to a PRC manufacturing partner. We have also recently switched ISPs, and were using their provided DNS. I switched to 8.8.8.8 and everything was resolved. Seemed a little quicker too, but that just may be wishful thinking on my part.

had the same experience switching over to google dns... was using opendns for a long time, but started having problems with name resolution, websites timing out, etc.

switch over to google and all those problems have stopped, and dns resolution is much faster

I'm not a fan of OpenDNS.

A while back my LAN suddenly stopped working. None of three machines could see the others. After I spent a whole afternoon scratching my head, I brought out the heavy artillary, Wireshark. What great tool.

It finally occurred to me that I had switched to OpenDNS the day before. Normally when you try to access your LAN, a DNS request is sent, and the reply should be "no such name" because 192.168.x.x is a non-routable address. OpenDNS was simply not answering, gumming up the works. I switched back to my previous DNS server, restarted the network, and everything was fine.

I tried OpenDNS but had problems and my ISP servers were very slow sometimes (Plusnet), so I switched to Google a few months back. All has been fine since, except for an occasional hang this last week. This has now ceased, so I put it down to a temporary problem with Firefox Nightly, which crashed twice in the same period.

I also tried the Comodo DNS but it wasn't as reliably quick.

Phil

Personally, I use Comodo Secure DNS, and I haven't seen any delays or performance issues with it. I prefer to use it because they maintain a real time blacklist of sites with malicious content. That's easier for me than constantly updating my hosts file to try and accomplish the same thing via some of the hosts files you can find online that have entries for many of the same sites.

That way, if I try to access a site in their blacklist, it redirects you to a warning screen about it (and depending on the nature of the threat, you may have the option to bypass the warning if desired if you want to risk it). Using Comodo Secure DNS adds an extra layer of security, since I need to run Windows at times, too.

Here are their DNS Server Addresses:

8.26.56.26
8.20.247.20

More about it here:

http://www.comodo.com/secure-dns/

.
Well, that was uproarious. I tried the Comodo servers and the same thing happened on my LAN as with OpenDNS—it replies with an IP address that appears to redirect to an error page instead of saying, "no such name." That must confuse my networking setup, making my Samba shares disappear and be unreachable from my PC.

I've also had good luck with the Level 3 servers at 4.2.2.[1-6].

http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles ... ns-server/

That's very odd, since OpenDNS and Comodo Secure DNS work for me. Is the redirect error screen from the dns servers (either a comodo error screen or an opendns error screen). If not, then you may not be using those dns servers.

I do see a number of forum posts concerning problems with the TalkTalk DNS servers accessing sites like distrowatch.com now (as well as other sites hosted by netsonic). So, you can't help but wonder if the problem is deliberate versus just a problem with their DNS servers not updating properly.

But, if it's a DNS name resolution issue because of the way their DNS servers are configured, then switching to different DNS servers should solve it. If the error screen you're seeing is not specific to the DNS (either a comodo or opendns error screen), then I'd suspect something else is causing the issue).

Personally, I keep my router setup for Comodo Secure DNS using these addresses:

8.26.56.26
8.20.247.20

But, I've also seen posts from TalkTalk users say that switching to OpenDNS solved it for them. These addresses:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

See the last post on this page for a TalkTalk user indicating that switching to OpenDNS solved the problem:

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/183055/#p183055

Since neither are working for you, I'm wondering if something is being setup wrong or your router may need rebooting or something to that effect. Are you restarting your network connection when you make the router change (click on the network icon in your system tray, then click on Auto eth0 so that it reconnects to your router again (grabbing a new ip address via dhcp and using the router's currrently setup dns servers)?

Note that one thing you can do is type something like this from a terminal to see what dns servers are being used to resolve the url and what ip address is being used for it:

su
nslookup distrowatch.com

For example, when I switch my router to use one of the OpenDNS servers, I see this (works fine for resolving distrowatch.com, as a TalkTalk user reported in the thread I linked to);



If Google's DNS servers are working for you, then you could just leave it as is and be happy.

But, I'd be curious why other DNS servers are not working for you (OpenDNS, Comodo Secure DNS), and suspect that they're not really being used (and I'd try rebooting your router and making sure to restablish a new connection from your PC, then check to make sure the new DNS servers are being used via something like the nslookup command above).

Interesting reading folks, many thanks for replies.

Having used http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/ to establish the location of UK DNS severs, they all appear to be in the same location.

Google public DNS servers for 8.8.8.8 / 8.8.4.4 is located in the USA and yet seem to give better performance for me compared to any of the UK based ones.