On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 12:34 +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote: > I've heard that one could run a local DNS server to speed up internet > access. Does this have a real-world advantage for a home user? As I > understand it, the first time I go to www.example.com it would have to > contact the ISP's DNS servers to find the address, so there is not > advantage, but the next time it should be cached. Is this accurate? > Can someone fill me in? > Hi Dotan, You are quite right about your example. The assumption is that you are more likely to visit the same website more than once (maybe even several times in the course of a single day or week). I think that's a reasonable assumption. But there is another aspect to this: Your ISP and/or your company/organization may run its own name servers, but in some cases, these name servers may not be very reliable (or even available). Having your own local caching DNS server gives you the ability to continue resolving names and accessing websites even when the upstream DNS server is down. For this reason alone, I run a caching DNS service on my laptop. HTH, pascal chong
