For the last several weeks I’ve been having alot of trouble with my RoadRunner internet access. I’ve had 2 separate technicians come out and look at it, with varied results. The first time I lost my connection entirely after several days of slow speeds, and he found a line noise problem that got it working again. The second time I had been suffering from intermittent loss of connection and slow speeds, the guy noticed that my cablemodem (Motorola Surfboard SB4100) was peaked out because of a wiring glitch across the street. That got it working again.

But just a few days after he left I started noticing problem again. As I hadn’t touched anything this time, I was a bit wary of calling him again without some more information. After some digging and diagnostics, I noticed that my Vonage was working just fine with perfect signal quality. Even the bandwidth tests performed within reasonable limits, and I was able to play CounterStrike and Day of Defeat without any trouble. The only thing that really seemed slow was browsing the web.

Then it hit me: DNS. The DNS servers seemed to be extraordinarily slow at resolving hostnames into IP addresses. As Vonage & most of these games operate primarily on pure IP addresses, they weren’t impacted. It’s really no surprise, as it’s been known for quote some time that ISP’s stink at serving DNS. So I set out to find a substitute DNS server and stumbled across OpenDNS.

OpenDNS is a free service, with some great instructions on configuration for pretty much every router on the market, to replace your ISP’s DNS. They also have a few other nifty features like they’ll automatically block resolution of known phishing site addresses, and they’ll autocorrect some common typos (the example they keep using is they’ll redirect craigslist.og to craigslist.org for you). They make their money from redirecting invalid hosts to their own internal search engine, a technique recently attempted by Verisign in the name of SiteFinder. Like SiteFinder, this service can screw up certain anti-spam measures and such by making all hostnames resolve to an IP address, but unlike SiteFinder this is opt-in instead of global mandatory (Article on Differences between SiteFinder & OpenDNS).

I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far it seems to have fixed my problems. Web sites pull up easily 5x faster than before and everything seems more responsive. As most of my surfing is done via links & bookmarks, I haven’t run into the search page yet, and I think the anti-phishing features will be useful (if nothing else, for a warm fuzzy feeling). I’ll let ya know if anything changes.

Update 3:21pm :
One of the guys at OpenDNS was kind enough to send me a link to their blog where they detail how they’ve managed to find a way to keep their typo-fixing service from messing up anti-spam measures.  Basically it now recognizes attempts to reverse-lookup email hosts and doesn’t try to fix them anymore.  That just makes OpenDNS that much kewler.  Add to that the fact that one of their guys managed to find my blog entry here and post a comment in under 3 hours, and I think they’ve done a great job of addressing the concerns of the community and their customers.. (Are we really “customers” if it’s free?  Maybe “users” is a better word.)
[tag:opendns][tag:dns][tag:internet][tag:web]

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