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Google Public DNS

Posted by Wilmer van der Gaast on
Today at work my first user facing product was released, Google Public DNS. I've worked a lot on it over the last months and it was actually the reason for my visit to NY this Summer. :-)

But now, finally after a long time, I can actually start calling the thing by its name instead of saying "my secret project at work", which makes me very happy.

Praise, complaints and comments about the service are welcome! :-)

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Arne on :

I've been using 4.2.2.4 as DNS, 'cuz it's sooooo easy to remember (and 10^1000 times better than fscking charter.com's DNSs). Why is Google's DNS special? Did you/they actually build their own DNS? Or did you just install an existing caching DNS package on a bunch of servers (I'm guessing it's not that simple)? Why should I start using Google's DNS? :)

Wilmer on :

You should use it if it seems faster. If it's not, then don't. :-) To find out which one's faster, you can try pinging and doing some test resolves. The IP addresses should be similarly easy to remember.

And it's customized software, not the standard BIND setup or anything like that.

arne on :

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 36.078/38.173/40.195/1.373 ms

--- 4.2.2.2 ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9012ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 17.219/20.822/32.027/4.022 ms

Guess I'll stick with the Level3 DNS then :-)

Wilmer on :

Remember that ping RTT is one thing, but resolution time is also important! Still, looks like L3 is nicely close to you so if it works well, little reason to drop it.

Wilmer on :

Yeah, it was my 20% project to prove that Go's an awesome language. While BIND (written in C) can only serve 1000 queries per second on an old 486, the Go rewrite can serve all DNS queries in the world. C is obsolete, I'm now rewriting BitlBee as well.

Tony Perrie on :

Jeez. Good to know there's still engineers out there doing real work. I thought the entire computer industry had devolved into Javamills and RoR start-ups.

Wilmer on :

Since I'm getting questions from people every now and then wondering whether I was serious here: Sorry guys, no, I wasn't.

I haven't actually learned Go at all yet even though I've been wanting to for a while already. (However it's unlikely that I'd rewrite BitlBee in Go.)

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