Dear Friends,

I came to know about namebench tool while working on a setup of DNS server, test results showed some servers working pretty fast. After investigating different options and many tests i managed to keep a good rank of DNS slave server. The idea was to keep checking available fastest DNS servers in the region and modify named.conf accordingly.

As many of us are not building a DNS server, I am not going to discuss it in details here, however in case you are using some flavour of GNU/Linux, UNIX you can use following method to have a faster internet experience.

To have it accomplished we are going to use namebench, cron and a small script. namebench looks for the fastest DNS (Domain Name System) servers accessible to your computer.

Namebench can be downloaded from
http://code.google.com/p/namebench/downloads/list

1. Become root.
2. mkdir /usr/local/fastdns
3. cd /usr/local/fastdns
4. Download namebench:
   wget 'http://namebench.googlecode.com/files/namebench-1.3.1-source.tgz'
5. tar zxf namebench-1.3.1-source.tgz
6. mv namebench-1.3.1 namebench
7. create a small script fastme.sh, using your fav text editor.
   
   
   Code:

   #!/bin/bash
   #script to detect fastest DNS servers in reach
   #and modify /etc/resolv.conf accordingly
   
   DIR_SRC=/usr/local/fastdns/namebench
   BASE_DIR=/usr/local/fastdns
   TMPDIR=/usr/local/fastdns/tmp
   export TMPDIR
   
   cd $DIR_SRC
   
   ./namebench.py | tee $BASE_DIR/checking.txt
   
   if [ "$?" -ne 0 ] ; then
   echo "issue with running namebench...aborting"
   exit
   fi
   
   #take a backup of existing resolv.conf
   cp -p /etc/resolv.conf $BASE_DIR/
   grep -A4 Recomm $BASE_DIR/checking.txt | grep name | tee /tmp/new-resolv.conf
   
   grep nameserver /tmp/new-resolv.conf
   if [ $? -eq 0 ] ;then
   
   cat /tmp/new-resolv.conf > /etc/resolv.conf
   
   fi
   rm -rf $TMPDIR/name*

8. Do a chmod
   chmod 755 fastme.sh
   
9. Add this script to get executed every 4 hours.

Another similar approach is used for modifying forwarders in named.conf which resulted in one of the fastest DNS server in the region, let me know if you want to know how.

Method here is just an idea, use at your own risk.

Suggest if you have some better idea :-)

all flames >/dev/null 2>&1

Thanks & Regards,
Anuj Singh

A word of warning to those who intend to use namebench as config/hostname_reference.cfg includes not only social networking and file sharing sites but also lists gambling, pr0n and extremist web sites. Running namebench (with or without the "censorship" switch?) in access-controlled networks may result in "interesting" results if requests can be traced back to your workstation and you can be held responsible for network policy violations. Also, unless I read over it, namebench doesn't actively query your or adjacent regional ISP's or upstream for name servers: instead it relies on a static list of name servers so the result may or may not be what you want. Also note caching name servers like Pdnsd will already query name servers in parallel to speed up resolving.

2 members found this post helpful.

I don't think using an *external* DNS server will be fast than using your provider's DNS!

goossen:

namebench looks for the available fastest DNS server in reach by the computer, it is not always true that the providers DNS is faster.

Thanks,
Anuj