[GLLUG] DNS servers

[Charles Ulrich]

On Monday 26 December 2005 17:56, Caleb Cushing wrote:
> can someone tell me how to get the addresses of some non-comcast
> nameservers. or just give me a couple from a couple of different ISPs

ACD's are listed on their network information page:

http://customersupport.acd.net/tech.html

Many other ISPs will also list their name servers somewhere on their tech 
support pages. You can often guess the name servers for most ISPs and 
companies by doing a lookup on "ns1" plus the domain name. On a whim, I just 
looked up ns1.google.com and put the result into my network configuration and 
it happily resolved everything.

Potential downsides to all of this:
- Not everyone allows clients outside their network to use their name servers.
- Latency to external name servers is bound to be much higher than to your 
ISP's name servers, noticeably degrading network performance, especially when 
browsing the web.
- It's considered bad netiquette to forego local name servers for external 
ones unless you're testing things out or your local name servers are on the 
fritz.

Obviously I don't know what your intentions are, but if comcast's name servers 
are acting up to the point of being unusable, then you should speak with 
comcast about it rather than hopping onto someone else's name server. In the 
worst case scenario, you can specify an external name server as a secondary 
in your network configuration or firewall (if it provides DHCP to the LAN) 
while leaving comcast's as the primary. That way, your applications will 
always try to use the comcast DNS and fall back to the external one if 
there's no response.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Charles Ulrich
Ideal Solution, LLC -- http://www.idealso.com