Monday, March 28, 2011

Change your DNS, Wait!

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Are you frustrated with slow broadband speed? Looking for a hack to increase internet speed dramatically? Search no more! Here comes the insanely easy tricks that would magically improve your browsing experience.

Well, those are the common punch line one would find on the websites and blogs trying to "sale" you tips to increase broadband speed. How mean! Those nice guys are trying to help me fix my internet and that too free of cost. And you, the useless oxymoron, say that they are trying to "sale" me the tips. Disgusting!
Doesn't the meaning of "sale" depend on the definition of "medium of exchange"? In the age of internet, human "time" and "attention" deserves to be in the same category as that of money. I prefer to treat all 3 in the same manner. So, when a website tries to give free tips, its in exchange of your time and attention. Its a sale.

Lets keeping that discussion aside. The first recommendation towards faster internet is changing DNS servers. The websites/blogs claim that the DNS server of ISP (internet service provider) are generally slow to respond resulting in slow resolution of websites you are trying to open. They recommend you to change over to OpenDNS or Google Public DNS.

Before buying into their recommendation of changing DNS servers, I decided to compare resolution speed of different DNS severs and came across an excellent bash script that servers the purpose. The script was written by someone called Stevan Bajić. The stories of OpenDNS being slow is well known now, but I was expecting Google Public DNS to perform better. To my amazement, my ISP's (BSNL) DNS servers were almost twice as much faster as Google's!

Here is a quick "how to" to figure out which DNS server is the fastest for you:
1. Download the dns.sh bash file (click on the link).
2. Open terminal from the menu.
3. Go to the folder where you have saved the bash file.
4. Make it executable with the following command: chmod u+x dns.sh
5. Run the script with the following command: bash dns.sh

This will give you a comparison of DNS resolution speeds of your present DNS server, Google Public DNS, Level 3, OpenDNS, and DNS Advantage. Find which DNS server is giving you the lowest numbers and change to that. It pays to be a skeptic, isn't it?

If you are on MS Windows, you will need one more step before you start.
Step 0 (for MS Window users): Install Linux.
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