[Edit: this question came out of my confusion. I thought Unbound could somehow substitute DNS servers (like CloudFlare), but it can’t. Apologies for my ignorance.]
I’ve often heard about Unbound, and the possibility of using it as a DNS resolver on my laptop. So, to be clear, not as a DNS resolver in a local network; just in a single machine, also because I’d like to use it no matter where I bring my laptop.
The instructions given in the second link above seem quite complete. Does anyone here have other tips or experiences to share? I’m with Ubuntu on a Thinkpad.
Cheers!
You may already have a local dns caching mechanism on your computer. I think by default Ubuntu uses
systemd-resolved
(it does on my desktops anyway). If you checkdig
it’ll show lookups coming from 127.0.0.53. With that in place, your local machine is caching lookup results and anything it doesn’t know, it’s forwarding to the network’s resolver (which it gets via dhcp, usually).Thank you for this comment. So Unbound does only DNS caching, without really resolving? I think I’ve completely misunderstood its purpose.
Unbound can query the root dns servers, but it’s also commonly used as a recursive resolver, which just uses a server upstream, similar to
systemd-resolved
. I use unbound network-wide, but I have it querying 9.9.9.9 to take advantage of their filtering.Now I understand, thank you for the explanation!
there’s nothing wrong with not using systemd-resolvd, but i’m curious as to why for a laptop; wouldn’t infrequent caching make it slow?
I’m starting to think that I’ve misunderstood what Unbound does. I thought I’d be a replacement for a DNS resolver (like CloudFlare). But from the replies here I’m starting to think it isn’t?
oic, i was under the impression that you wanted it use it on your laptop; not as a service like cloudfare.