All this week, we’ve looked at DNS and how to use the free program Namebench to speed up your browsing.
Click here to learn how to download Namebench
Click here to learn how to configure and run Namebench
Now that we have that data from Namebench, how are we going to put it to use? Let’s learn how to analyze the data.
Upon completion of the process, namebench will show the results in a new tab. Below is an example of what data you are presented with:
The large box on the upper left will show you how much faster another DNS server is in comparison to the DNS you are currently using.
On the upper right side, a box will appear with recommended configuration settings.
The “Tested DNS Servers” box shows all the data and specific information per DNS server. In the example, the UltraDNS server is the fastest DNS server.
The DNS shown in the yellow box is the DNS server that’s currently active – as you can see, UltraDNS is faster by 13%.
What’s next?
Now, you’ve been able to identify the best DNS server based on the configuration settings we put in earlier. It’s time to use the provided data to adjust the router settings, improve the internet speed and optimize your network as a whole.
Read carefully and complete the next steps to edit your router settings:
Look up your router’s IP address.
If you don’t know how to find your router’s IP address, you can do the following:
Windows users:
- Click on “Start” and enter the keyword “cmd” in the taskbar. Click on the icon.
- Enter the following line: “ipconfig/all”.
- Hit the enter key.
- Search the list for “Default Gateway.”
- The highlighted sequence of numbers shown below is your IP address.
Mac users:
- Open your system preferences
- Select “Network”
- Check what network is selected and hover over “Advanced”
- In the tab that opens, look for “TCP/IP”
- Then check the IP address after “Router”
Enter the IP address of your router into the browser.
If applicable, enter your router’s username and password to log in.
Now, it’s time to change the basic settings. Once you’re in your router’s main dashboard, look for “basic settings” or “Network” and click on it.
What you see here are the “Primary DNS and Secondary DNS” addresses. It’s recommended that you write them down or take a screenshot of these addresses in case you want to switch back to your older settings later. Note: I put in a random primary DNS address and deleted the secondary IP in the screenshot above for security reasons.
Now, we want to replace both the Primary and Secondary DNS with the data that was generated by namebench.
In our example it was:
Once you replace both the DNS server addresses, save the changes and log out from your router’s dashboard.
Note: a tertiary server is only used if the primary and secondary DNS servers were unavailable.
That’s all that’s needed for changing the DNS configuration of your router! It’s super easy.
There’s one more thing we need to do to speed things up. We’ll cover that tomorrow in the final part of our series.
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