A No Nonsense Blog

Heres how you can cache DNS to make browsing faster.
I am using Ubuntu and dnsmasq can be found in the repositories. (You’ll need to add Universe repository) You could also download dnsmasq here.

Do this if you’re using Ubuntu/Debian”

sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

now edit the file /etc/dnsmasq.conf and add the following

listen-address=127.0.0.1

Then edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and find the line

prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

and uncomment it (remove the “#” in front of it).

Now open /etc/resolv.conf , It should look something like this

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

and add “nameserver 127.0.0.1″ at the begining

nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

now lets restart dnsmasq:

sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart

now type this in terminal

dig google.com

Check the line that says “;; Query time: XX msec”

now try again and see that the query time is reduced to near 0 ms

Here is what I got

d1g1t@Kureyon:~$ dig d1g1t.net
…
;; ANSWER SECTION:
d1g1t.net. 3600 IN A 38.99.249.154

;; Query time: 562 msec
…
d1g1t@Kureyon:~$ dig d1g1t.net
…
;; Query time: 0 msec
…

The first one was using my actual DNS server, and the second one which used the dns cached by dnsmasq.

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You may also change the TTL (Time-to-Live) in the /etc/dnsmasq.conf
this is the amount of time the DNS record is cachedsearch for “#local-ttl=” put the time in seconds and don’t forget to uncomment the line (i.e, remove the “#”)