4.2.2.2: The story behind a DNS legend

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.<p>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&#38;T's DNS, which is simply appalling.<p>(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).

<i>Your ISP's DNS servers are the best choice for use as your DNS servers.</i><p>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.

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 <a href="http://code.google.com/p/namebench/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/namebench/</a> 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.<p>If we aren't supposed to be using 4.2.2.2 what's another option than 8.8.8.8 or opendns?

<i>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").</i><p><i>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><p>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...

I found my DNS servers at <a href="http://www.dnsserverlist.org/indexbeta.php?oby=Q_RTT" rel="nofollow">http://www.dnsserverlist.org/indexbeta.php?oby=Q_RTT</a>

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.