opendns | Linuxaria

DNSCrypt, crypt your DNS request

Jul 092012

OpenDNS is a popular DNS provider used widely both in the server as in home desktop, one of the feature they provide to their customer is DNSCrypt, a security enhancement that should add protection against all DNS based attacks, such as cache poisoning.

In the same way the SSL turns HTTP web traffic into HTTPS encrypted Web traffic, DNSCrypt turns regular DNS traffic into encrypted DNS traffic that is secure from eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks. It doesn’t require any changes to domain names or how they work, it simply provides a method for securely encrypting communication between OpenDNS customers and their DNS servers. The software is released as open source on GitHub.

At the moment this solution only works in conjunction with OpenDNS, which means that you need to change your computer’s DNS provider to OpenDNS to make use of the this security feature, that’s their business after all.

Let’s see in detail how to use it on Linux. Continue reading »

Namebench – DNS server benchmark

Guides 3 Responses »

Sep 222011

In a former article (1 year ago) i used a java tool to see which DNS was faster among Google, OpenDNS and my local ISP, and the winner it’s been my local ISP; but I’ve recently discovered another nice tool that can do these tests, so today I want to re-check these 3 DNS servers with namebench

Namebench it’s a small program wrote in python that search for the fastest DNS server near to you.
Namebench runs a fair and thorough benchmark using your web browser history, tcpdump output, or standardized datasets (top 2000 Alexa) in order to provide an individualized recommendation. namebench is completely free and does not modify your system in any way. The project began as a 20% project at Google.

namebench runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and UNIX, and is available with a graphical user interface as well as a command-line interface.
Continue reading »

Opendns, Google Dns or ISP ?

Guides, Pills 1 Response »

Aug 172010

In recent years we heard most often about using alternate DNS to those provided by your ISP.

But why not use your ISP’s DNS in theory it should be as fast as possible since there are fewer network hops to reach it, but the alternate DNS, provide additional services (such domains are known to report scams) are redundant worldwide and therefore offer greater stability.

Among the many DNS providers the best known are undoubtedly Opendns and Google Dns, the first is historically the market leader, offers additional services for a fee or the possibility of using their DNS servers for free, for some years I’ve used with satisfaction this service.