Dreams of Thought

Are dreams thoughts… or are thoughts dreams..

RSS Feed

Tag Archives: google

Comparison of Google Public DNS and Open DNS response

0 Comments

Google announced that it’s making 2 DNS servers available publicly. The servers are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 . They’ve also given configuration instructions on their DNS page. I configured my /etc/resolv.conf to refer to Google’s DNS. Before this I ran some quick tests using dig to compare it with OpenDNS.

$ dig @208.67.222.222 gingerjoos.com

; <<>> DiG 9.4.2 <<>> @208.67.222.222 gingerjoos.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 1273
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;gingerjoos.com.                        IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
gingerjoos.com.         14400   IN      A       208.113.199.196

;; Query time: 751 msec
;; SERVER: 208.67.222.222#53(208.67.222.222)
;; WHEN: Fri Dec  4 09:13:58 2009
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 48

$ dig @8.8.8.8 gingerjoos.com

; <<>> DiG 9.4.2 <<>> @8.8.8.8 gingerjoos.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 2594
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;gingerjoos.com.                        IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
gingerjoos.com.         14400   IN      A       208.113.199.196

;; Query time: 616 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Fri Dec  4 09:14:09 2009
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 48

$ dig @8.8.4.4 gingerjoos.com

; <<>> DiG 9.4.2 <<>> @8.8.4.4 gingerjoos.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 34741
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;gingerjoos.com.                        IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
gingerjoos.com.         14321   IN      A       208.113.199.196

;; Query time: 123 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.4.4#53(8.8.4.4)
;; WHEN: Fri Dec  4 09:15:28 2009
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 48

Dig allows you to directly query a DNS server and get its reply. It shows stats from that query – response. The stat we’re interested in is this one

;; Query time: 123 msec

The IP 208.67.222.222 is the address of the OpenDNS server. Let’s try one more query


$ dig @208.67.222.222 mec.ac.in

; <<>> DiG 9.4.2 <<>> @208.67.222.222 mec.ac.in
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 44308
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mec.ac.in.                     IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
mec.ac.in.              604800  IN      A       210.212.232.132

;; Query time: 389 msec
;; SERVER: 208.67.222.222#53(208.67.222.222)
;; WHEN: Sat Dec  5 12:38:57 2009
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 43

$ dig @8.8.8.8 mec.ac.in

; <<>> DiG 9.4.2 <<>> @8.8.8.8 mec.ac.in
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 56600
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mec.ac.in.                     IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
mec.ac.in.              160448  IN      A       210.212.232.131

;; Query time: 121 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Sat Dec  5 12:39:06 2009
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 43

You can try more queries and see for yourself. At least as of now Google DNS seems to be faster.

Filed under technology
Dec 5, 2009

User agent GTB or GTB5 is the Google Toolbar

0 Comments

Was checking out this blog’s visitor stats recently when I came across this User Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 GTB5".  I was wondering what GTB5 was. Some googling and testing later I found out that GTB is in fact the Google Toolbar. To compare, here’s the UA of a Firefox browser with Google Toolbar installed :

"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 GTB5"

And here’s another Firefox without it :

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"

Also, if you plan to capture the UA string in the Apache logs, make sure that feature is turned on. Your LogFormat directive must have something like \"%{User-Agent}i\" in it. For eg,

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined

You can check the Apache documentation on custom log formats for more info. If you’re using XAMPP/LAMPP, you might want to comment out

CustomLog logs/access_log common

line in your httpd.conf and uncomment

CustomLog logs/access_log combined

line.

Filed under technology
Oct 5, 2009

Mobile updates on Orkut?

4 Comments

A while ago I got a message on my mobile from “TM-Orkut”. It was a scrap written by a friend on my Orkut scrapbook. I suppose this means they’re trying out mobile updates. There’s nothing about this yet on the Orkut blog. Looking forward to this feature. Hope it comes soon.

In case you have any news, do leave them as comments :)

May 20, 2009