Smarterware

How to Know When Your DNS Servers Are Failing

December 6th, 2009

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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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