a broken mold

This morning I dreamed that Archie Buck¹ had reported on Facebook that his internet service provider‘s DNS went down (I checked Facebook before I wrote this post: it didn’t really happen). Yikes. Because that’s my ISP now, too.

So, if your less of a computer person, you’re probably wondering what exactly DNS is. It stands for Domain Name System and this is what it does:

The most basic task of DNS is to translate hostnames such as theos.in to IP address such as 74.86.49.131. In very simple terms, it can be compared to a phone book. DNS also has other important use such as email routing.

From Vivek Gite’s post Free Fast Public DNS Servers List.

What does this mean for you or me? It means if the DNS server we use is down, we can’t type in www.google.com and get to Google because our computer doesn’t have a way to find the correct IP address behind that domain name. Same for Facebook, Twitter, or anything else.

And so, I got to thinking I should probably grab some alternate DNS server IP addresses, know how to use them, and tell you to do that, too.

First off, a list of servers (IP addresses are comma separated):

• Google Public DNS: 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4
• OpenDNS: 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220
• ScrubIT: 67.138.54.100, 207.225.209.66
• DNS Advantage: 156.154.70.1, 156.154.71.1

Thanks again, Vivek.

And now, how one uses them. Google has a page on how to configure Windows, OS X, and Linux to use their DNS servers. Just replace the Google Public DNS IP addresses with those you want to use (or use them if you want). Go copy that info right now (and the list of DNS servers above (or Vivek’s)). If you’re on Windows XP, try here.

And… it might never happen to you, but if it does it can be a real pain; you have an internet connection but you just can’t go anywhere (or some places). So I’d recommend stowing away that information in case it ever happens. Here are some tips at Lifehacker to figure out if your DNS servers just went kaput or something else is wrong.