Friday, February 02, 2007

Fixing Local DNS Unreliability

For years I've struggled with bad DNS servers in South Africa, and now that Tiscali (formerly referred to ad World OFFline) and M-Web are the same company, their DNS is equally slow. Some days you have to refresh almost every page just to get it to load.
ADSL has improved things a bit, when the DNS servers work at all. I have a list of local DNS servers that keeps changing: 196.43.1.11, 196.43.1.14, 196.25.1.1, 196.25.255.34. The problem is that at times they ALL stop working, or take ages to time out, causing delays and timeouts, even on better browsers such a Firefox.
Now I've added two more DNS servers to the mix: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. They are the servers run by OpenDNS, a free service. The difference has been noticeably better, unless the international link is down, in which case everything is then broken anyway.

OpenDNS: Providing A Safer And Faster DNS
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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousTue Feb 06, 04:50:00 PM GMT+2

    South Africa's DNS works fine. Why are you complaining about this kind of rubbish, you spoilt racist bastard

    ReplyDelete

The last 50 anonymous "comments" have been spam, and were deleted before being published. I have disabled anonymous commenting for a while, until the spammers go away. I appreciate all genuine comments, and publish all comments that are on topic and not spam.