Here goes!

How many times, on a cloudy sunday afternoon, have you wondered while surfing the net "Damn, are my ISP DNS down or is it a local problem only?". Way too many times, I'm willing to bet.

There are alternatives to the somewhat crappy and often sluggish DNS our isps are providing, there was first OpenDNS which seems to make a fair number of people happy and now google public DNS or whatever. It's a good alternative provided you don't care what those companies do with your data but what if there was a better alternative? I'm going to try and provide you with one thanks to Unbound a small DNS resolver that's targetted at both being simple and using low system resources. 

It doesn't take rocket science to install but I still felt the need to make a post.

Step one is to head to the Unbound download page and get either the installer version (if it's a firt time install) or the zipped one (for hassle-free upgrade).

Step two is to get the DNS root hint file available on the INTERNIC ftp server labeled named.cache. Move it to the Unbound directory.

Then edit the service.conf file to make sure there's a mention to the dns root hint files.

root-hints: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Unbound\named.cache"

Once that's done and if you don't need the server to listen to requests on your local network, just head to Control Panel\Administrative Tools\Services and look for the Unbound entry, you should be able to start it, and it should start correctly as well. If it doesn't, check your Applications event log for error messages.

To test whether it's working or not before you change your network settings, just launch a command prompt and type nslookup -127.0.0.1 and type google.com or whatever domain name comes to your mind.