Our dear Mac OS X loves to use DNS, for instance when browsing the internet every connection attempt is followed by a DNS lookup (as far as I know). There is not much caching being done on the local machine, therefore I had put this on my to-do list: Document the setup of a local DNS server on your own network that would efficiently cache most of the DNS requests to forego most of the slow internet DNS lookups.
I’m still struggling with parenthood and version 2 of the ISP in a box still has a problem somewhere which I’m sure I had solved but somehow due to all the attention loss I have forgotten what it was about.
When I read Matthew Mullenweg (of WordPress fame) blog entry about OpenDNS I was a bit sceptical. I wouldn’t think speed improvements where possible, the DNS provided by my ISP should be the quickest solution. But to my amazement there was a speed increase when I switched the DNS servers on my Mac. Not much but is was notable and that is enough for me, until I get my own DNS server I’m using OpenDNS.
The added bonus is they promise to prevent phishing and do spell checking. I haven’t had phishing emails for some time so I can’t tell you if that works but the spell checking is great. They correct the typo’s in the domain name you enter in your browser. Try it yourself and find out it is very easy to use they have the the settings you need to change on your local Mac or on your Airport well documented. The best thing it is all for free as well. Hope you like it as well as I did.
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July 24th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
Glad you’ve found OpenDNS notably faster. I hope we can help you skip the “install local DNS server” part of your to-do list indefinitely. But if you do use local DNS, you might still use OpenDNS as a forwarder.
Cheers,
John Roberts
OpenDNS
August 1st, 2006 at 5:43 am
Hi Richard (and other readers!),
It’s funny you posted on this topic because I’ve been doing a bunch of research into DNS this past week. I moved and started using my mac mini server behind a Qwest DSL modem doing port forwarding to the mini. It worked great for computers elsewhere on the internet, but all of my local machines on the same private network were no longer able to access the mini by the domain name (a common problem with some routers, including the old graphite AirPort basestations). Apparently the router gets confused when it does a lookup of the domain name’s IP address and finds it to be its own, so it passes the traffic directly back to the computer that initiated it, instead of obeying its port-forwarding rules, or something.
The solution, it seems, is to run “split DNS”. The DNS server on the internet that is responsible for your domains stays configured as beore, but you also run a local DNS server on the mac mini server (or any other computer on your local network) which processes all of the DNS requests for the network and grabs requests for the domain names on the network and translates it into the 10.0.x.x private IP of the server, instead of the publicly accessible internet IP address. Other requests are forwarded to DNS servers on the internet (and OpenDNS could be used, as John states above).
I haven’t bought and installed the software yet, but cutedgesystems has written a gui that should do just the trick for configuring BIND to make this a relatively easy project. It’s called DNS Enabler, and the website is here: http://cutedgesystems.com/software/DNSEnabler/ . I don’t work for this company, and I’m not a customer yet, even, but unless anyone else has better ideas or suggestions, I think this is the direction I’m going to go.
-Nate