I recently had fiber broadband installed at the house. This meant switching provider, and getting a whole new router. ISP routers, by-and-large are terrible, and this one was the type which only allows changing a limited set of options through the web-based admin page.
For a while it was working fine enough, but I started getting lots of DNS issues; accessing sites was terribly slow due to looooooong lookup times – when the lookup succeeded at all! I looked for the option to switch to using the OpenDNS servers, but there was no way to do this through the UI.
Of course, I figured someone had to have run into and fixed this problem before, and with a little hunting around, I was proved right – Pete Cooper had documented how to change these settings through the archaic and arcane wonder of telnet.
Logging into my router through the console, using Pete’s instructions, it soon became apparent his steps had been broken by a firmware update – only a couple of the commands worked. But now I had a lead, I was sure I could figure it out. With a little digging around, and judicious use of the help command, I was able to put together this sequence of commands to update the DNS settings:
# To list your current DNS servers dns server forward dnsset list # To a new primary DNS server with higher priority than the default dns server forward dnsset add set=0 dns=208.67.220.220 label=None metric=4 intf=Internet # Add the secondary as above dns server forward dnsset add set=0 dns=208.67.222.222 label=None metric=4 intf=Internet # Save our changes saveall
With the commands entered, my web surfing instantly got a massive speed boost as the DNS issues went away 🙂 I should point out that I left the default PlusNet servers in there as back-up. If for some reason I can’t connect to OpenDNS, the router will fall back to the PlusNet DNS.
Very handy – thank you! And certainly a clearer post than half the ones I found on forums!