Danie van der Merwe

GRC's DNS Benchmark software is getting a new version after 15 years

Seems that v1, which is now 15 years old and nearly 10 million downloads, still gets downloaded over 1,000 times daily. But it has needed a fresh for a while now. IPv6 is here as well as encrypted DoH, DoT, DoQ, etc.

There is a roadmap published at the link below outlining what the planned new features look like. There will still be a free version with some new features, but there are also Plus and Pro versions that have a once-off fee, but do include all future updates.

Although it was (and still will e) written to work on Windows OS, it will be fully compatible to run under WINE on Linux.

So hopefully this will be available sometime later in 2025.

See GRC's | DNS Nameserver Performance Benchmark  

DNS Nameserver Performance Benchmark

#technology #DNS

How to Choose the Best (and Fastest) Alternative DNS Server

Your internet service provider offers its own DNS servers, which help you turn websites like www.howtogeek.com into their respective IP addresses. Your devices use those by default, but you can set your own preferred DNS servers for a bit of improved speed.

Many DNS servers will also block malware, pornography, and other types of websites, if you want them to.

If you're looking for something faster than your ISP's DNS servers, you should run a DNS benchmark to find what's best for your connection. The fastest DNS server will depend on your geographical location and internet service provider, so there really isn't one fastest DNS provider for everyone.

See How to Choose the Best (and Fastest) Alternative DNS Server

Resolved to use a faster service?

#technology #DNS #Networking

DNS servers translate domain names into IP addresses. If they fail, you can't access websites or find results in a search engine. Diagnosing whether the DNS server is causing problems can be tricky, but the fix is quick and easy. You can change your DNS server on any Android device, including phones, Chromebooks, and the best cheap tablets.

Your internet provider chooses your default DNS server if you have the default setting still for DHCP to provide an IP address, gateway and DNS server on connecting. The issue is, your ISP can then also see exactly what sites you are visiting, or even censor sites so you cannot visit them. Note if you use a VPN, then you do bypass your ISP completely, and the VPN's DNS server is usually used.

But you can pick from many other DNS servers to use. Some DNS servers are faster, some provide malware blocking and advert blocking, and some also encrypt DNS over TLS (DoT) or DNS over HTTPS (DoH).

See How to make Android use the DNS server of your choice

Not all DNS servers are created equally

#technology #DNS

Are you still using your internet service provider’s DNS server? Unsure of why your choice of DNS server is important? Here’s why you might want to change your DNS server right away.

Change your DNS server for better privacy, faster browsing, protection from known malicious websites, and to circumvent DNS-level censorship.

What I found especially interesting, are the various additional links the article also provides.

See Why You Should Change Your DNS Server Today

#technology #DNS #privacy

Are you still using your internet service provider’s DNS server? Unsure of why your choice of DNS server is important? Here’s why you might want to change your DNS server right away.

Your router (or phone when on mobile data) makes DNS requests as you browse the web. By default, though, your ISP sees all your searches and web addresses. You can change your DNS settings for increased security and privacy.

DNS over HTTPS, DoH, is a new protocol that encrypts DNS requests and inter-server traffic. However, logged and cached DNS requests are not encrypted. They’re only encrypted in transit. And of course, most ISPs log everything they can, and they don’t all support DNSSEC and DoH.

But you can set your phone or router to default to using quite a few different free and privacy based DNS servers. Discussed in the article are OpenDNS Home, Google Public DNS, Cloudflare, DNSWatch, and Quad9, along with their DNS IP addresses to use.

I long ago set my router to use Quad9, and my phone had a pick-list of options too. Then you just forget about it as it keeps working. Note that on Samsung phones you may be prompted to enter a domain name instead of IP address, and you can find these at https://www.smartphones.how/internet/private-dns-mode-android.

See The Best DNS Servers for Secure Browsing

#technology #privacy #DNS

Your router makes DNS requests as you browse the web. By default, though, your ISP sees all your searches and web addresses. You can change your DNS settings for increased security and privacy.

The latency (time to respond) from your chosen DNS server, determines how quickly your web browser will find the IP address to load a website. You can choose other DNS servers apart from the default one you may get from your ISP.

But how do you know which DNS server will offer the best speed? The answer is simple: you need to check and compare the speeds of various DNS servers to find out which one works best for you.

To do this, you need to run a latency test, which measures how quickly your device is able to communicate with the DNS server, because the result I’m getting will not be the same for everyone.

This can be done by using various tools such as “dig” and “nslookup,” which allow you to check the speed of the DNS server by pinging it and then comparing its response time.

See How to Test DNS Speed using Two Popular Tools on Windows and Linux - TREND OCEANS

#technology #DNS #networking

Learn how to use the command-line utilities nslookup and dig to test the speed of DNS queries on Linux and Windows. This step-by-step guide will show you how to measure the time it takes for a DNS server to respond and retrieve information about a domain or IP address.

The term edge computing reflects the recognition that the cloud has boundaries. To reach those boundaries, your data has to connect with one of the physical datacenters powering the cloud. The cloud itself can be as fast and powerful as possible, but it can't do much to offset the time required for the roundtrip your data has to make.

The answer is to use the edge of the boundaries of regional networks and the cloud. When initial services or computation happen on servers at the edge, it speeds up a user's interactions with the cloud. By the same principle, you can create your own edge by running some services on your home server to minimize roundtrip lag times.

One particularly useful and easy change you can make to your home or business network to give it a boost is running a DNS caching service. With a DNS caching service running on your network, once any one device on your network obtains a number assigned to a website, that number is stored locally, so no request from your network need ask for that number again. As a bonus, running your own DNS caching server also enables you to block ads and generally take control of how any device on your network interacts with some of the low-level technologies of the internet.

As more and more websites get added to your server's DNS cache, DNS traffic will have to go farther than your local Dnsmasq server less and less often.

See Boost your home network with DNS caching on the edge

#technology #linux #opensource #dns #raspberrypi

If you've been hearing a lot of talk about "the cloud" over the past several years, then you may also have heard rumblings about something called "the edge."

This sounds a bit like an advert, but I have tried to avoid use of Cloudflare (mainly because of how they intercept end-to-end SSL to speed up hosted services), but like it or not, I have seen a dramatic thing happen. Since moving to a new hosting service, the webpages there which I administer, take 30 to 60 seconds usually to load. I've tried different DNS providers as well as using my ExpressVPN and even changing browsers, but even other webpages were sluggish, taking a good few seconds to load.

So I saw this YouTube reviewer speaking about his experience with Cloudflare WARP, and I thought, what have I got to lose by just trying it as it costs nothing. For Manjaro (Arch based) Linux, I installed the warp-cli binary from AUR, and did the three or four steps to activate it. Well just wow, the same long loading pages now jumped up in about 1 second! Yes, WARP is technically a VPN, but I would not recommend it for privacy or security, just speed (if it helps you). I still have my ExpressVPN (and there is ProtonVPN) if you want to be more sure of privacy.

This may also help me try to pinpoint why I was getting such exceptionally bad load times before, as I can see the problem was not distance, nor my ISP link, computer or browser. It is likely some DNS or configuration issue. At least it shows it is not my new hosting that I moved to, or the docker setup I'm using.

See Announcing WARP for Linux and Proxy Mode

#technology #networking #DNS #cloudflare #Linux

Starting today Cloudflare WARP is available for Linux and comes with the ability to run as a local proxy.