DennyHalim.com

there are many many ways to speed up your browsing experiences.


one of many ways is optimizing your DNS server list.
each and every file on the internet is located on a certain (sub)domain.
so, each and every request of any file from your browser will need to query DNS servers first, before it can be fetch to your browser.

as you can see, DNS play significan roles in your browsing experience. if you're using firefox and see a lot of 'looking up someslowdomainname.com' then your DNS is slow.

here's how i speed up DNS lookup a little bit. first, install dnsmasq to do dns queries and cache all the results. thus repetitive lookup will perform much faster because the result is already in cache.

then, tell dnsmasq to do the queries to opendns to let it filtered out phising and malware sites. but, opt-out the opendns guides and block my local ISP ads.
edit /etc/dnsmasq.conf and add this lines:

#http://winware.org/bogus-domains.txt
bogus-nxdomain=92.242.132.11 #telkom speedy indonesia ads
bogus-nxdomain=67.215.65.132 #opendns guides
#bogus-nxdomain=208.67.219.135 #opendns blocked pages
#bogus-nxdomain=64.94.110.11 #verisign

last, must not pass this one, tell the clients (i use wicd to manage my linux networks), including browsers, messengers, etc.. to query local dnsmasq instead of the far away opendns servers.
edit /etc/resolv.conf.head and add these lines:

nameserver 127.0.0.1 #query local dnsmasq
#dnsmasq will query these. also, in case dnsmasq fail, all apps will query these too:
nameserver 208.67.222.222 
nameserver 208.67.220.220

if you need more redundancy, in case all your dns fail, add this to /etc/resolv.conf.tail

#google's 
nameserver 8.8.8.8 
nameserver 8.8.4.4

wicd will automatically merge dns from your router/isp between resolv.conf.head and resolv.conf.tail


now... our dns is much faster... what else can we do to speed up browsing? what do you do?

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