There is one operation that’s completed very often when programs connect to servers on the internet — that’s resolving DNS names (finding out the server’s IP address by its name). Typically, you use a DNS server of your ISP. It’s relatively close to your network, so it may be fast. This short post is about setting up a local caching DNS server on OS X for even faster DNS responses.
Setting up dnsmasq
There is the canonical BIND DNS server, but I’ll use the lighter dnsmasq, which uses only ~470 KB of memory on my mac. Installing it on OS X is very easy:
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$ brew install dnsmasq
Now, as suggested in the output caveats, copy the config file:
NOTE: since dnsmasq doesn’t know any addresses at the beginning, it needs to know whom to ask => you need to specify a secondary DNS. There may be another way in dnsmasq.conf.