DSL on the Farm and DNS Anonymity
For the last year or so, my house has had Satellite Internet through DirecWay. While the download speeds were much faster than the dial-up that we had for the previous nine years, the time it took to make a call to a server took forever. The upload speeds were also abymsal.
Embarq DSL was recently made available on the mountain, which is a god-send. While we can only get the lowest speed package (1.5 mbps/384 kbps) it is worlds faster than satellite or dial-up.
One problem that I was having was with Embarq’s DNS servers. Every five requests or so, I would have to wait 20-30 seconds for a response. I’m not sure if this is an overloading issue or if there is a cap that Embarq puts on requests from a given IP address.
To get around this issue, an individual on the DSLReports forums suggested that I use OpenDNS. OpenDNS is a free domain name resolution service with some extra features. Check out the Wikipedia article on OpenDNS.
I changed the primary and secondary DNS IP addresses on my modem, and it worked like a charm. Requests are instant. OpenDNS also has functionality for fixing spelling errors in a URL and for protecting against phishing attacks. OpenDNS is funded by advertising that shows up on a custom notification page when you spell a URL wrong that OpenDNS cannot resolve.
Upon further research, there seems to be some question as to user anonymity when using the OpenDNS service. When using your ISP’s DNS servers, you are largely anonymous because DNS is a highly distributed technology. When using OpenDNS, your lookups are centralized. This is scary, especially in light of AOL’s recent publication of twenty million search queries by 650,000 users over a three month period.
For the time being, I have switched my primary and DNS servers to 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2. These servers are run by Verizon/Level3 and are not restricted to Verizon customers. The lookups are similary quick when compared to OpenDNS. I will continue to use these servers while I research the anonymity issues of OpenDNS.