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Christine

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5 Comments

  1. 1

    Vince Lund

    Then you can use namebench to compare speeds of different DNS servers.

    Editor: Fixed the Namebench link in this comment.

  2. 2

    Cheng-Jih Chen

    Er, I don’t know about Mac (and I don’t have a Windows box to try this on), but I’m pretty sure “dig” and “nslookup” will treat the “http://” as part of the hostname.

    I believe “nslookup” is deprecated on Linux distributions, with “host” as the preferred DNS query tool, e.g., “host http://www.cnn.com“.

    Note that with “host”, you can specify the DNS server to query by putting it at the end of the statement, e.g., “host http://www.cnn.com 8.8.8.8″. You can compare the results from different DNS servers if you want. “nslookup” and “dig” will have similar options to query specific servers.

  3. 3

    Jimmy Blake

    Cheng-Jih Chen is correct. You’ll want to leave out the ‘http://’ on those commands. If you’re using OpenDNS, they’ll still pull up an IP with the http://, but that’s only because OpenDNS resolves everything to its own IP if it can’t find the server.

    Otherwise though, it’s a great suggestion to show people how to determine if this is their problem or not. Using an alternate DNS has many times saved the day when my ISP has had trouble.

  4. 5

    Gina Trapani

    Thanks y’all–just removed the http:// from the commands in this post.

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