Smarterware

How to Know When Your DNS Servers Are Failing

Now that both Google Public DNS and OpenDNS offer an alternative, public DNS services anyone can opt to use instead of their service provider's DNS servers, the question is: how do you know if your DNS service isn't working properly and if you should switch? Reader Nicholas has the answer. He says:

The easiest way to determine if your chosen DNS servers are down, you can use nslookup or dig command line tools. Open a command line prompt (Select “Start > Run” and type “cmd” on a Windows machine, “Applications > Utilities > Terminal” on the Mac) and type:
dig google.com
or
nslookup google.com

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