Public DNS to the rescue

A few weeks ago I was staying at a cheap hotel with crappy wifi. The connection to the access point appeared to be ok, but I couldn’t visit any websites. Just out of curiosity I tried to ping a server I knew by IP, and it worked. I checked the ports I knew to be open on that server to make sure it’s really the server I know, and it all made sense.

In short, it looked like the networking and routing was fine, except DNS. Then I remembered something about public DNS services. So I did a quick search on my phone (mobile internet, as opposed to my laptop), and found these addresses of Google Public DNS:

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

I added these lines in /etc/resolv.conf:

nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

Bingo, problem solved! Good thing these numbers are easy to remember.

Public DNS to the rescue —23 January 2015