Google recently launched a new Public DNS resolution service. I’m very excited to see this.. the most commonly-used public resolver up until now has been OpenDNS, which works fairly well, but has some features that I do not likely — namely, it will (by default) redirect any requests for non-existing domains to a host on their network, which will then reply to web pages with a pretty “This doesn’t exist” page. However, this can cause havoc for other services, such as SMTP. They will also attempt to auto-correct mistyped domains, which is handy, but just gives me the creeps. All of this can be disabled, but to do that, you have to sign up for an account with them, and register whatever IP you happen to be on. Pain in the rear. And it also gives them the ability to track your queries to a username, although you can ‘disable’ that feature too.
I did some quick tests against Google’s service, and it looks great so far – excellent response times, and not doing any of the “naughty stuff”. It seems that the “naughty stuff” was actually one of the things they wanted to prevent, which I completely agree with.
If you’ve been beta testing this or trying it out since the announcement, let me know how it’s going for you!
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Big fan here… I have always been suspicious about OpenDNS. Google’s service does respond pretty quickly, so I’m sold.