At that point, your Mac won’t be able to load any websites.įortunately, there are other companies out there that offer free DNS servers that you can use with your Mac. That’s not a problem unless the service provider’s DNS servers become unavailable. When you purchase internet access from a company like Comcast, your Mac will automatically use Comcast’s DNS servers. Why You Should Change Your DNS ServersĮvery internet service provider operates their own DNS servers. Imagine a giant phone book with the IP addresses for all of the websites on the internet. DNS is essentially a directory of all the websites in the world.

When you type in a URL in to your web browser’s address bar and press Return, your Mac contacts a DNS server to find the IP address associated with the domain name. DNS was created to map memorable domain names, like cnn.com, onto IP addresses, like 151.101.65.67, which is the CNN website’s IP address. The problem is that IP addresses can be difficult to find and remember. Just like a friend could find your house if she had your address, your Mac can load a website if you type its IP address in a web browser. Every website connected to the internet is assigned something called an IP address, which is similar to a home’s street address. To understand how DNS works, you need some background information. In this tutorial, we’ll show you everything you need to know about DNS to speed up surfing and ward off potential problems. That’s why it’s important to learn about DNS and consider changing your DNS servers.

But if the DNS servers you’re using are slow or unavailable, websites will load slowly or won’t load at all. It’s a system invisible to you, the user, and most people don’t even know it exists. Your Mac uses something called the Domain Name System (DNS) to access websites. To query another different nameserver using dig or nslookup to look up dns information or check that your nameserver is acting OK – we’ll use the public Google nameservers at:įor dig use it on the command line like so: dig įor nslookup: nslookup 8.8.8.AirPort Apple Apps Backups Developer Education Email Hardware Internet iPad iPhone Mac Music Network Photos Security TV Weekend Wonk The results are returned to you on the command line. In macos you can query a domain via the command line via default nameservers with a couple of DNS querying tools, notably nslookup and dig, how that works is on the command line: dig

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