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

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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