Matt's

Random stuff that's awesome.

Posted 9 months ago

Namebench: Find Better DNS Servers

http://code.google.com/p/namebench/

namebench is an open-source, cross-platform tool to find the fastest DNS servers. I switched to Google’s DNS servers long ago assuming they were faster. namebench “found” Verizon’s public DNS servers in Boston and found that they’re 93% faster than Google’s DNS.

For reasons that make no sense, the best “Boston Verizon” DNS server 151.203.0.85 has a hostname of boston2-qwest.bellatlantic.net, maybe due to some strange acquisitions I wasn’t aware of? Stranger still, whois on the IP shows it’s from RIPE, not ARIN. It further shows that it’s running Nominum Vantio, which I’ve never heard of, but which markets itself as a high-performance recursive DNS server/cache.