If you are an IT/Network professional with UNIX/Linux/BSD experience and you have a network at home, you really can’t resist playing around. It’s the best way to learn and causing outages at home will only irritate your family.
I’ve been using Google Public DNS for a day or two and it’s fast and responsive. Even though a simple test shows that Google’s Public DNS on a per query basis is slower, the end user experience has been faster (at least for me). But OpenDNS is more feature rich and I’d like to see if I can get a good experience using it.
I revisited my OpenDNS account dashboard and found out that they now offer an option called SmartCache, which I have enabled. I also downloaded the OpenDNS Updater onto my kitchen notebook. That notebook is on all the time and it make’s sense to run it there. FIOS has already once given me a new IP address and I want my OpenDNS settings to follow my network at home.
OpenDNS’s blog has a good explanation for SmartCache here and more info here. It’s a useful feature and you have to applaud them for offering it to their free account users.
End user experience is a very subjective thing so I’ll see if OpenDNS has the same feel or better as Google Public DNS. Like most folks, I just want web browsing to work and be fast.