DNS

Domain Name System is like a phone book. It is how the internet converts names such as leaptel.com.au into an IP address to make it easy for you to navigate the internet using easy to remember names.

You should use Leaptel DNS servers rather than a third party DNS server because ours will provide you a better optimised response.

Our DNS servers are state based, locted in VIC, NSW, QLD, SA and WA. When you use our dynamically assigned DNS servers, we set your primary DNS to be the server local to you and the secondary to be the server one state over. So when DNS based path selection is being done by providers you should get directed to the cache closest to you.

Lets say that you are accessing facebook.com. Your computer talks to your local DNS server (let’s assume Leaptel). Leaptel then sends a query to Facebook’s DNS server. Eventually Facebook’s server responds, based on its internal mechanisms, with the IP address it determines is the best for Facebook.

What we have seen is Facebook may use the source IP (which in this case is Leaptel’s DNS server) to determine the closest facebook.com server. Based on Facebook’s algorithm it should hopefully return the ideal cache for you. If you use a third party, Facebook would optimise the response based on connectivity of that third party DNS server which may be located far from your location. For example, we have seen with a third party DNS that Facebook would return a Singapore IP address. Adding delay to your web request.

This kind of thing can happen fairly often with larger Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) who optimise and route based off DNS initially to distribute requests to the closet network point.

No, when you connect up we provide the DNS servers best for you to use inside the PPPoE connection or the DHCP packet. Your router will receive them. It should then be using them and passing them out to your devices on your local network.

By statically assigning them on your devices, if we make a change (which we do now and again) you may end up with incorrect information.

Currently we assign DNS servers based on location as shown below:

Our DNS servers are set to lookup the DNSSEC values and return to you the DNSSEC response. We don’t filter out invalid responses at this stage, but we do return to you if it is valid, so you can make the choice if you wish to use that response or not.