4.2.2.2: The story behind a DNS legend | Hacker News Reader

4.2.2.2: The story behind a DNS legend

tummy.com

95 pointsab938 comments

Instead of hunting for a public DNS server to use, you can just run your own. djbdns, for instance, comes "out-of-the-box" with a working cache. This puts some marginal extra load on the DNS roots, and so it's probably not a great idea for Microsoft to build it in as the Windows 7 default, but it's perfectly fine for one-offs.

In some limited testing, I find Google to be faster than 4.2.2.2, both to be faster than OpenDNS (which you shouldn't use, because they suppress NXDOMAIN), a local cache to be competitive with OpenDNS, and all of these options to be faster than AT&T's DNS, which is simply appalling.

(I test with nsping, which is a goofy program I wrote in the mid-'90s to test the resolvers at an ISP I helped run).

With OpenDNS you can enable or disable NXDOMAIN: http://www.opendns.com/support/article/312

but only for a static ip. If you use OpenDNS on your laptop, and go use coffee shop wifi, unless someone else has disabled NXDOMAIN from that IP, you will get their NXDOMAIN landing/redirect page instead.

Which limits its usefulness to desktop systems on a static IP.

Your ISP's DNS servers are the best choice for use as your DNS servers.

In theory, yes. Your ISP is obligated to provide them, and they're probably very close on the network. In practice, I've seen shockingly slow DNS on fairly high-speed internet connections. Switching to 8.8.8.8 or 4.2.2.2 on those connections drastically improved web browsing.

Another problem is that some ISP DNS servers will redirect you to one of their landing pages when you mis-type a URL.

Time Warner occasionally sends me to their stupid "landing" page even if I get the address correct. Their DNS service is definitely sub-par.

Cox does this, and the results are 100% (shockingly irrelevant) ads.

Yes, agreed. I'm on BT Business and their DNS is terrible. With normal browsing the slowest part of a page load was the DNS look up. Doing anything vaguely automated - even when being nice - would result in loads of timeouts. I've since switched to openDNS (free, non-member) and it's been excellent.

Same goes with O2. Their DNS gets flaky from time to time. 4.2.2.2 works great.

While not terribly slow, I changed from my ISP's DNS servers to the Google ones because they occasionally don't work. When they work they are pretty fast. However, from time to time they were unresponsive. Sometimes that didn't happen for days, and sometimes they were unresponsive for 30-second bursts several times an hour, and then you couldn't browse the web or check your email.

I changed to 8.8.8.8 and waited to see if that was the problem. Since I changed the problem hasn't reappeared, so I keep using 8.8.8.8. I'm no friend of giving Google all my data, but the privacy policy on their DNS servers is quite clear. They don't use the data to correlate it with anything and only cache it for some times for technical reasons, whiping it afterwards. It's fair and doesn't redirect you for failed queries.

Curious - what obligates them to provide DNS service?

From a legal point of view, it would be fairly easy to make a case that it's implied when you sell internet access.

From a business point of view, failure to provide DNS would appear no different from an outage to the vast majority of users. An ISP that didn't provide DNS would be out of business in very short order.

Shaw's DNS here in Edmonton is completely down at least a few hours a week; when it is up, it's slow. OpenDNS/Google/4.2.2.2 are both more reliable and faster

I recommend GRC's DNS benchmark. http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm - which lets you compare a range of publicly available dns servers, and measures their responsiveness. 8.8.8.8 or 4.2.2.2 maybe easy to remember, but depending where you are on the planet, they aren't necessarily the fastest.

I've used this for pinging for years when there are dns problems. If dns is working I usually hit google or yahoo.

For everyone interested to change their DNS check out http://code.google.com/p/namebench/ For me 8.8.4.4 and others are faster and work better then the one provided by my ISP, at least it feels that way.

There is no way in heck I am giving Google all of my DNS requests on top of email and adsense on every site I visit.

If we aren't supposed to be using 4.2.2.2 what's another option than 8.8.8.8 or opendns?

is there anything wrong/dubious with openDNS?

yes. see tptacek's comment.

You can easily configure OpenDNS to work exactly like a normal resolver.

People always seem to forget this point.

I didn't forget that I can login to OpenDNS and fix my settings every time my IP changes, I just think it's ridiculous.

I learned one during grad school which is meant to serve the school network but accepts requests from anywhere. I've just kept using that.

John Hawkinson had set aside 4.2/16 ("under the label "Numerology" since he had the wisdom to see that the numbers in themselves could be valuable").

My opinion is that among the reasons it is so well known are that it was designed from the very beginning to be memorable, and they folks setting up this service had the foresight to realize that having it on an easy IP was valuable.

I don't agree with the author's idea that an easy IP address is especially valuable. They're not making any money when technicians use their service because the IP is memorable...

Yes, it's hard to imagine that Level 3 has made much money from that IP address. But that doesn't mean memorable IP addresses aren't, in general, valuable.

4.2.2.2 could still be considered "valuable" because it's used as a public service for the Internet community, and its memorability increases the value of that service. And Google apparently thinks it can make money from the data it collects on its 8.8.8.8 nameserver; do you think that project would be just as valuable to Google if it were 216.44.159.113 instead?

That is a pretty narrow definition of "valuable."

I am very very sure Google does use the data coming to their DNS for statistical analysis etc. If it is your intend to see what people visit, DNS is a highly valuable resource and an easy IP might make people use yours.

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#privacy

If you are correct, there is a massive conspiracy at Google, where a single whistleblower would be able to cost the company billions of dollars.

Not sure what you mean. I mean plainly logging the domain lookups, using the data what the masses do not tainting the privacy of the individual.

I found my DNS servers at http://www.dnsserverlist.org/indexbeta.php?oby=Q_RTT

I have been using 4.2.2.2 for years but did not realise others were until now. It was the only IP I could remember from public dns servers list.

I thought I was a nerd, but I must not be, because that was one of the least interesting stories that I've ever read. I want my 3 minutes back.

Agreed, I was hoping for more dramatic/unexpected/insightful story than 'we picked an easy to remember number and it turned out to be too much effort to restrict access to the public'.

We're sorry that this reality is not dramatic enough for your tastes.

The style in which it was written can only be described as "infuriatingly circumspect".

To each their own, I suppose, but I enjoyed this story quite a bit. A bit like the Fast inverse square root story, or the Control-Alt-Delete stories, it's fun to see the origin of interesting and neat things, even if they are somewhat predictable.

I've been using this server as a ping and DNS test for at least 5-6 years, so it's great to hear more about it.

Do you have links to any of those other stories? (I'm thinking specifically of the cntrl-alt-del story but anything else interesting would be neat)

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

http://www.gannettonline.com/e/trends/18001162.html

Great Thanks!

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