ldns-explorer 1.3

A public DNS resolver explorer

LDNS Explorer

This explorer is executed on a client machine to measure performance implications of choosing a DNS resolver (“LDNS — Local Domain Name Server”) among various alternatives including the ISP-provided resolver and several public resolves, namely, Google, OpenDNS, Cloudflare and Quad9.

This work was supported in part by NSF through grant CNS-2219736

Installation

Visit https://pypi.org/project/ldns-explorer/

Usage

You can invoke the explorer anywhere by the following command.

python3 -m ldns-explorer

Customized Test Case

We support customized lists of test domains and resolvers beside our sample test cases.

If you would like to add domains, please create a txt file called domains.txt under the directory you invoke the explorer.

The file structure is one domain per line.

domains.txt:

example1.com
example2.com

If you would like to add DNS resolvers, please create a txt file called resolvers.txt under the directory you invoke the explorer.

The file structure is one domain per line. resolvers.txt:

0.0.0.0
1.1.1.1

Disclaimer

The purpose of this project is twofold. On one hand, we hope it will help Internet users choose a DNS resolver that would improve their own Web browsing experience. On the other hand, we would like to obtain general insights about performance of DNS resolution infrastructures, which may lead to improvements of the Internet for everybody. For the latter purpose, the DNS Explorer will send the result of the measurement to us. No personally identifiable information is collected or accessed by the application -- only the public IP address and the performance metrics. You can disable this functionality by typing NO to the corresponding prompt during the application execution; however, we hope you choose to participate in this crowdsourced data collection in recognition of our effort in creating this application.