[karajorma]

No.  Don't be ridiculous.  However, that average value displayed after ping might come in handy, hmm?

No it would be completely worthless as a measure of DNS resolution speed since the address has to be resolved before you can start building the ICMP packets that ping uses.

Hmm.  Not sure what you're on about; OpenDNS gives their DNS address out on their website.[/color]

It gives out the IP address of their servers. If you have the IP address of their server you wouldn't be using DNS when you pinged it anyway. You already have their IP address.

I was getting the impression that Ghostavo pinged a few of his favorite websites to test whether OpenDNS was faster than his DNS.. which ofc would not work as an accurate measurement of DNS performance.  I take it that was not the case?

It's not any bloody measure of DNS resolution. I'm assuming he simply pinged the OpenDNS DNS server and his own ISP one and compared the ping times. That's still a dreadful measure of resolving times because OpenDNS is always going to respond more slowly. It makes up ground by not having to resolve the request as it knows the IP address already.

So basically I don't think either measure would be a good one. And since nslookup doesn't measure resolution times I'm not entirely certain what is the best way to measure resolution times.

Did all of jr2's posts have to be deleted?  Now it makes everyone look dumb. 

Yep. Which is why I'm sticking them right back.

[jr2]

*sigh* It wouldn't have looked dumb if someone had simply deleted the entire thread.  Karajorma has raised some valid points, but I don't really care for all of the attitude that comes with certain others' comments.  If you have legitimate stuff to say, say it.  Do not suggest that I am somehow less intelligent than you because I thought it might be worth a try, and experienced positive results.

[karajorma]

I'd never suggest you stop using these guys if you think you've found a good solution. All I took issue with was the perceived attitude of "Well it's just DNS, there's nothing that can go wrong if I change my DNS server".

As I've pointed out there are quite a few things that can go wrong. As long as you're aware of the potential risks and willing to take them I say go ahead and use it.

[jr2]

...And I wasn't saying you were. 

[Fury]

Sorry for resurrecting an old topic but this already has many informative posts and debates and I see no reason to repeat all that again in a new topic. If you have complaints, I'll ***** slap you.

So, to cut the chase I got curious about 3rd party DNS services after Google announced their own service to rival OpenDNS.

I decided to test both Google DNS and OpenDNS against my own ISP's DNS and was surprised to see that everything loads up noticeably quicker when I use OpenDNS or Google DNS. The difference is large enough that I have switched my DNS provider to OpenDNS. Google DNS is so new that I'll let it grow and improve before I consider using it instead of OpenDNS. More competition in this field is good I think.

As for privacy, I really have no concerns since OpenDNS has been operating for many years without any incidents I would care about. Only time will tell how Google DNS turns out, but for now I'll be using OpenDNS and enjoying increased browsing speed.

One of the main reasons why I switched is that my own ISP's DNS sometimes forgets that hard-light.net exists. Which is funny considering both hard-light.net and game-warden.com domains are hosted by same company, yet game-warden.com works when hard-light.net doesn't. Really annoying and OpenDNS solves the problem.

http://www.opendns.com/ (OpenDNS registration is optional, servers are listed in bottom right corner of their homepage.)
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

[Stealth]

host your own DNS server if you're so worried. that's what i do, and it's worked out for me

swooh.com

[castor]

dnsmasq FTW!

$ dig www.hard-light.net

; <<>> DiG 9.5.1-P3 <<>> www.hard-light.net
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 8143
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.hard-light.net.            IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.hard-light.net.     85690   IN      A       96.31.94.83

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Thu Dec 17 22:53:32 2009
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 52