Because I didn’t have enough things to do already, this weekend I finished putting together a DNS caching server for my home network. What this essentially means is that when a computer on my home network looks up a URL, it does so through my server. The server caches the entries, resulting in faster web browsing because the machines don’t have to wait as long to figure out that google.com is located at the address 74.125.226.17.

One other neat trick that my server does is when machines on my home network try to browse to my web domain (bryanstamour.com), instead of getting my external network address and then being redirected to the internal address where the website actually is, they get the internal address right up front. If you are outside my network, you still have to go the long way through, but if you are on my network, connecting to my sites is as fast as can be. This is nice because quite a few scripts that I’ve written to transfer data between my laptop and server will run a lot faster now when they are connected to the network.

And back to work I go.