15 ms·
Google and OpenDNS made the web faster for everyone today
- blibble 15y agodon't most people use their ISPs DNS servers, making this mostly irrelevant?
- mrsebastian 15y agoIn what sense? It's easy to change DNS servers. Or do you mean that ISP DNS servers are generally close geographically?
- blibble 15y agothe latter, e.g. I'd assume an competent ISP with a large customer presence on the west coast would have DNS servers for their customers on the west coast, or just use anycast...
- mrsebastian 15y agoYeah, not sure. I think most ISPs use just a couple of DNS servers for their entire network -- or at least that's the case here in the UK. But as you say, anycast might mean that those two IP addresses are actually represented by many servers. I guess we'll need the input of someone who works at an ISP :)
- mcpherrinm 15y ago"A couple DNS servers for their entire network" in the UK is equivalent to having geolocated servers in North America. The UK has a small land area, and so latency talking to the other side of the continent is nowhere near as much an issue.
- davidu 15y agoYou would hope that to be the case, but it is not generally true.
- thirsteh 15y agoIndeed. What I'm reading is, "Google Public DNS and OpenDNS are relatively centralized, meaning CDNs might deliver you content from a cluster in Great Britain rather than your home country Germany because your DNS server is located in London. Now, you will get content from Germany again." The article makes it out to be something fantastic and exclusive to these services when the news is actually that these services used to have a big problem in this regard, and now they're working to fix it.
- jcampbell1 15y agoI have found setting custom DNS breaks many coffeeshop and airport wifi hotspots, and so I don't recommend it for the general user. I can't imagine there are that many people using Google's DNS or OpenDNS.
- CraigRood 15y agoYou could change the DNS settings on your home router, so when your machines pull the DHCP data you will receive the modified DNS. But when out and about, everything will work as expected.
- spydum 15y agoWhile this is true for most consumer users who work using their providers DNS, for networks such as enterprises/corporate locations, it's common to find they all share a common internal DNS resolver, which may be located in one physical location, while the clients are sprawled all about over the world. I think this does give a bit more power to the geo-aware dns services (such as Cisco GSS), if they implement it.. but it's a long way off, as many ISPs and networks would need to upgrade their resolvers to support this extension.
- someone13 15y agoThis is pretty interesting, and I've never heard of it before today. However - I am a little worried that this seems to allow anyone that enables this option to track all users that make DNS lookups. And it doesn't say if there's a way to disable the behavior, short of switching to a DNS server that doesn't do this.
- brlewis 15y agoUsually the company that now gets the first 3 octets of your IP4 address is the same company that will get your full IP address anyway when you hit their web page.
- jcr 15y agoYour statement is true, but unfortunately, you're not thinking it through completely, so you don't see the worrying implications. Most modern web browsers these days do "DNS Prefetch" which is a fancy way to say domain names found within web pages are resolved to IP address before they are actually needed. This means the new GIS (Global Internet Speedup) garbage will send the first three octets of your IP address to every evil spamming/tracking site that has a link on the page you're viewing regardless if you followed the link due to the browser doing a DNS prefetch. If you run your own DNS server, then the browser DNS prefetch is already allowing you to be tracked, and by full IP address rather than just the first three octets. On the other hand, most people do not run their own DNS server, so GIS is a reduction of privacy.
- someone13 15y agoThe DNS prefetching was exactly what I was thinking of. With GIS, if my site shows up in Google (or elsewhere), I can now track exactly how many people see my site, and from where, without them ever clicking on a link.
- michaelcampbell 15y agoI'm a network neophyte, so go slow, but can you explain how? Is it this? "Basically, when your browser makes a DNS request, the DNS server will now forward the first three octets (123.45.67) of your IP address to the target web service." So say you search for something on google; google returns its search results page, your browser gets the page, looks at all the links, asks DNS for the IP's to all those links' addresses, and DNS auto-sends YOUR (truncated) IP to all those addresses' servers? I guess I'm unclear on why it would do that. If the truncated IP coming to a CDN isn't coming with an actual request, how do they know that at some time later your actual request is from your truncated IP? (I also don't understand why a CDN would use some sort of DNS address as a geolocation strategy, but I guess that's another discussion.)
- dougb 15y agoThe title is misleading. It not going to make the web faster for everyone. Content hosted on CDN's that don't support the proposed DNS extension (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip-01 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip-...) ie Akamai, is probably going to be slower (higher latency.) In fact, worst case is that you will be mapped to a server that is not allowed to serve your ip. CDN's get a lot of free traffic by helping isp's with peering imbalances. But this free traffic is restricted to specific ip blocks.
- davidu 15y agoThis option isn't enabled for Akamai. There is no way it can make Akamai slower. Title isn't misleading, but your comment is.
- sirn 15y agoI thought the parent is trying to say accessing content via Akamai will be slower when using Google Public DNS/OpenDNS because they don't support the purposed DNS extension thus the request is routed to a non-local server instead of local one? (Akamai is my main reason of not using OpenDNS to this date, otherwise I would make a switch for long)
- davidu 15y agoAhh, this is possible. Not as likely in the US, but possible. We're working on it. At least it's fixed for Youtube, all Google properties, a bunch of other CDNs now. But yeah, some big guys still remain! We'll get 'em.
- amalcon 15y agoMore importantly, it has no effect on the vast majority of users who are not using Google DNS or OpenDNS. This is a workaround for a specific problem with public DNS servers, and while it's not a bad one, we shouldn't pretend it's going to help everyone.
- gst 15y agoThere is a good reason why this feature is not part of the official DNS spec, as it breaks DNS caching: Once you cache results those three octets are pretty useless.
- davidu 15y agoThat's not true at all. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-subnet-00#section-5.3 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-sub... Caching works just fine. There is some cache inefficiency, but memory is cheap. Really cheap. http://www.jcmit.com/mem2010.htm http://www.jcmit.com/mem2010.htm
- _delirium 15y agoThe article exaggerates the most likely effects of this, which are a mild improvement in latency and very little in throughput. If you're in a country with very poor international connectivity, it might be possible that your 20 Mbit connection is downloading at Kbit speeds due to choosing the wrong CDN site, but that won't be the case for most people. The common case is that throughput is not really affected--- typical downloads from well-provisioned sites on the wrong side of the Atlantic max out my DSL anyway. When they don't, it's almost always a problem with the particular mirror's last-mile connectivity, not with the transatlantic cable.
- davidu 15y agoI think you misunderstand how this works. Poor geo-targeting results in increased latency which is directly correlated with throughput and it increases congestion. Fixing that has tremendous benefits.
- _delirium 15y agoI've never seen a significant difference in throughput on a home connection due to a US/EU mistargeting, at least, certainly not on the level of Mbits being reduced to Kbits. I just tested now, and downloading from a California mirror is able to max out my DSL quite easily (I'm in Denmark). I do get lower latency from European mirrors, but not higher throughput, because both can saturate the link.
- nl 15y agoAre you using the Google or OpenDNS DNS Servers? That's the real issue - previously these DNS servers did not work well with CDNs because they didn't send the location of the client making the request to the origin server. This extension fixes that problem. If you aren't using these DNS servers then CDNs probably route your requests properly.
- _delirium 15y agoI am using Google's, but that isn't really the point; the point is that in real-world usage, the example in the article of a multi-Mbit connection ending up with Kbit-level throughput due to being routed to the wrong CDN is very unlikely if you live in the U.S. or Europe. It would require either a really broken TCP stack, or gigantic satellite-internet-level latencies for latency to constrain throughput that much.
- newman314 15y agoHN post to the original site. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2941991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2941991
- RexRollman 15y agoDoes ChromeOS use Google's DNS by default?
- mauriciob 15y agoNo, it uses the same DNS server your OS uses.
- cpeterso 15y agoChrome OS, not Chrome browser.
- MostAwesomeDude 15y agoNo. ChromeOS is actually Gentoo Linux (surprise! Didn't you know?) and it uses a relatively standard method of grabbing DNS nameservers from DHCP. You can't even change this without mucking around in the internal read-only filesystem. You can certainly assign new DNS nameservers after you've DHCP'd, but in that case, why not pick faster DNS servers than Google's?
- RexRollman 15y agoThank you for your reply. I had no idea at all that it was based on Gentoo!
- dennisgorelik 15y ago"The first three octets provide more than enough data to divine the country you are surfing from," divine???
- cmhamill 15y agodivine v. [trans.]: to discover or locate (as water or minerals underground) usually by means of a divining rod. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/divine http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/divine
- dennisgorelik 15y agoThat definition is not there (merriam-webster.com). Even more - when I Google for "divine v. [trans.]: to discover or locate" -- the only link is to your comment on hackerstream.
- akkartik 15y agoWow, I didn't realize they were crawling us that fast. I see that definition at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/divine?show=2 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/divine?show=2 (To not have the creators of hackerstream come crawling out of the woodwork, you may refer to it as 'that which shall not be named'.)
- yohui 15y agoYou need to click on "divine (verb)", third on the list of "entries found". Or the direct URL: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/divine[3] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/divine[3]
- caf 15y agoThe root is from the Latin word divinare - to forsee / predict / prophesy.
- losvedir 15y agoSure, doesn't sound strange to me at all. Basically a synonym for "determine". (Native English speaker, California)
- eridius 15y agoSounds like this still won't fix the Netflix issues with OpenDNS/Google DNS, since Google doesn't have Amazon on board.