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Google launches public DNS service

December 31st, 2009 No comments

Another competitor to OpenDNS. The Internet giant google is expanding its territory to DNS service. This new venture after the much hyped Google wave, is said to be as part of their ongoing efforts to make the Web faster.

Google Public DNS uses Prefetching before the TTL on a record expires. They refresh the DNS record continuously, asynchronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains.

It guarantees speed, validity and improves security .

“DNS is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can poison the cache of a nameserver and can route all its users to a malicious website. Until new protocols like DNSSEC get widely adopted, resolvers need to take additional measures to keep their caches secure. Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages,” explained Prem Ramaswami on the Google blog.

If you want to test Google’s Public DNS resolver, use “8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4" as its IP addresses. For those of you familiar with OpenDNS you will know how to edit your DNS settings already. A set of step-by-step instructions for Windows, Mac and Linux users can be found here.

Google Public DNS is hosted in data centers worldwide, and uses anycast routing to send users to the geographically closest data center.

Let’s give it a try.

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