My MacOS X

1 month ago Google announced on their official blog that they were offering the use of their DNS server to the public.

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we’re launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out.

Why use Google’s DNS?

The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. This can slow down the browsing experience. Google have suggested that using their DNS will speed up internet usage and browsing.

Using Google’s Public DNS for Snow Leopard

• Step 1 (System Preferences):
  Open your system preferences and select the Network panel (it will be in the Internet and Wireless section).
  
• Step 2 (Network preference pane):
  In the Network preference pane, make sure your network connection is selected (Airport or Ethernet) and click “Advanced”.
  
• Step 3 (DNS tab):
  Open the DNS tab in the next panel and add Google’s DNS servers using the “+” button.
  DNS Server 1 (preferred): 8.8.8.8
  DNS Server 2 (alternate): 8.8.4.4

• Step 4 (Delete old servers):
  Delete all your old servers or move them to botton (hold Command + mouse click and move)
• Step 5 (Save work):
  Then just “OK” and “Apply” your way back out of the various dialogs and you should be good to go.
• Step 6 (Testing):
  Test that your setup is working correctly; see Testing your new settings

tags: dns, google, internet

DNS request are usually cache, that’s good as it speeds up the lookups within the same host but sometimes we will want to clear the cache so it don’t hold the values that are no longer valid.

In Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5) or Snow Leopard (10.6)

To clear DNS cache in Leopard, just type this in your Terminal and hit enter.

dscacheutil -flushcache

To Clear DNS cache in Mac OS X Tiger

Use the following command:

lookupd -flushcache

What is DNS?

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a naming system for computers, and anything else on the Internet. When you type a website’s name into your browser address bar, the DNS gives you the IP co-ordinates to find the server.

tags: 10.5, cache, dns, Snow Leopard