The last time we talked about the strange Internet problem my aunt was having. A little bit of investigating later, I discovered that the problem was with the BSNL DNS gateways in Hyderabad. When she was trying to browse the web, my aunt was being redirected to a phishing website.
I fixed the problem by going into her Wi-Fi router and changing the DNS settings, and she’s now surfing happily with no strange happenings that I’ve heard of.
Just a quick refresher if you missed the last column; DNS refers to Domain Name System. It’s like a telephone directory for the Internet. DNS tells your browser that a seemingly random string of numbers, like 121.241.247.61, actually refers to www.thehindu.com. DNS is what translates the machine language that the Internet operates on into human language that we can understand and use.
In the past, we’ve talked about ad-blocking, cookies and maintaining privacy online. But we’ve never talked about factors like DNS that could also affect your online security. This is something that’s very easy to overlook because it seems so technical, at which point most people’s eyeballs glaze over. It’s actually quite easy, as long as you follow some simple instructions.
Changing your DNS will save you from facing issues like my aunt did (along with many others, if the forum posts regarding the BSNL issue were any measure). Apart from making your browsing more reliable and secure, changing the DNS settings on your Internet router can also make your browsing noticeably faster and let you filter unwanted Internet content.
To change the DNS settings in your router, all you need to do is login to the router, navigate to the area that has the DNS information and make the change. Your router’s manual will show you exactly how to change your DNS settings. A quick web search with model name and number will give you a PDF version of the manual, in case you’ve lost it.
Now that you know how to change the DNS, you need to decide what DNS to use. There are a couple of choices out there, both of which are definitely better than the DNS that most ISPs use by default: OpenDNS and Google Public DNS.
Google’s Public DNS service is probably the easiest to configure. Using it also appreciably speeds up your browsing, especially if you’re moving from your ISP’s default DNS. I was using this when I was living on a semi-remote mountain top, just outside Coonoor.
OpenDNS offers a free and a paid-for service. The free service is great and will provide more than enough features for most people. If you use OpenDNS, you can filter web traffic right at the router, blacklist certain sites and much more. It just gives you a lot of control over your surfing.
I highly recommend visiting both the Google and OpenDNS websites to check out what moving away from the default DNS your ISP provides can do for you. Believe me, you won’t regret it.
