namebench looks for the fastest DNS servers accessible to your computer. You can think of a DNS server as a phone book: When you want to dial a company on the phone, you may have to flip through a phone book by name to find their phone number. On the internet, when you want to visit “www.google.com”, a DNS server needs to looks up the correct address for you.
Over the course of loading a single web page, your computer may need to look up a dozen of these addresses. While your internet provider usually automatically assigns you one of their servers to handle looking up these addresses, there may be others that are significantly faster. Namebench finds them.First it needs some Python library if you aint got it already. This is used to allow namebench to use a Graphical interface, if you do not use this, I think it will default to command line, so its not vital if you don’t want to use it.
sudo apt-get install python python-tk -y
Then we need to get the namebench stuff.
wget http://code.google.com/p/namebench/downloads/detail?name=namebench-1.3.1-source.tgz
tar -xvzf namebench-1.3.1-source.tgz
cd namebench-1.3.1
./namebench.py
Click that one button, and away it goes!.. It does tend to take a while, so either go make some c4wf335 or visit www.nutella.co.uk cause I want visitors! 😛
When the benchmarking is complete, you may get a surprised to what it suggests. Apparently my ISP is 150% faster than openDNS, but it is cable 😉 However, there are allot of other benefits of using other dns services (opennic for one) as it will give “some” amount of anonymity to your browsing.