The advantage to configuring your router to use smart DNS is you will no longer need to configure each individual device on your internal network.
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How to configure your DD-WRT router to use a smart DNS proxy However, since your current IP address will be included in any DNS query to its system, there’s no obvious additional downside to this. It does not explicitly say what my previous IP was, but it’s definitely tracking the fact that it changed. When I changed my IP address in the SmartDNSProxy service, this message was displayed: Please note: We have detected that you were previously using a VPN service/Data Center IP, please disconnect from the VPN/Data Center and use your own IP address to activate our services. Some smart DNS providers seem to keep previous IPs, at least for a while. You can infer from this that at least your current IP address is recorded in the system. This is how you are authorized to use its nameservers in lieu of the fact that DNS servers don’t support authentication. In order to use most smart DNS proxy services, your current IP address has to be registered in the system. Privacy conscious people will naturally need to trust services that have access to this much information about their browsing habits. Even when you’re not intending to stream and just carrying on with your day-to-day business, the smart DNS service can see all your DNS queries. Once you switch to a smart DNS set of nameservers, all of your DNS queries will be sent to those DNS servers.
How private is a smart DNS proxy service? Your ISP will know that you’re streaming from a smart DNS proxy whereas it is much harder for your ISP to see what you’re doing inside an encrypted VPN tunnel. Proxies, on the other hand, allow for much higher speeds but the downside is that speed comes by sacrificing privacy. VPNs provide superior privacy over proxies because VPNs encrypt traffic and hide your real IP address. A VPN is not inherently better or worse than a proxy, it’s just different. There is no silver bullet and different technologies address different problems. I’ve tried to illustrate that concept in the diagram below. For example, queries to a search engine like Google would cause the smart DNS servers to respond with Google’s real IP and your subsequent visit to Google would not go through the smart DNS proxies. Note that only sites the smart DNS service is configured for use the proxies. Since the Netflix server can only see the proxy’s IP address, it doesn’t know to restrict the content. The video stream comes back in reverse order it is sent from Netflix -> to the smart DNS proxy -> to my device. That means the flow of traffic is from my device -> to a smart DNS proxy that is allowed to access the Netflix content -> to the Netflix servers. That smart DNS proxy IP will exist in the same country as the service you want to access in my case – the United States, allowing access to the restricted content. When using smart DNS, the DNS servers will return the IP address of a smart proxy server rather than a Netflix IP. For example, a device running a Netflix app starts by requesting the IP address for the Netfilx service from your DNS servers. Smart DNS servers reply with different IP addresses for specific queries. If the Netflix server sees a Canadian IP requesting United States content, it will not allow that. This is a necessary piece of information that the server needs in order to send the stream back to your app. Under normal operations, this allows the Netflix server to see your real IP address. The app then uses that information to request content from that IP address. Using Netflix as an example: your Netflix app makes a DNS query to find out the IP address of the Netflix server it should connect to. The DNS system resolves human-readable domain names to computer-readable Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Smart DNS is a combination of Domain Name Server (DNS) servers and tactically located proxies.
Test your new settings to ensure it is working.How to configure your DD-WRT router to use a smart DNS proxy.