Forced DNS Servers

[Dom]

So first I'd like to take this chance to quickly say hi to all. I've been a fan of Hak 5 for 5+ years but never really had any form of interaction with the community, so what better way to start than asking a question:

I'm currently attending University in London where I'm living on campus and forced to use the on campus internet connection. I have no problem with that speed wise, although I am a little sketchy on the security side of things (doesn't appear to isolate clients very well etc), however the University forces us to use their own DNS which is plagued with a constant downtime, has horrendous traffic filtering and is just outright annoying.

Do you guys have any suggestions as to how I may be able to return to my sanity by using Google's DNS again and somehow bypassing my Uni's DNS or am I going to be forced to dig a deep hole and curl up in it whilst I suffer :(

Thanks guys

PD: OS wise I use a selection of Linux Distros, Mac OSX and Windows.

[cooper]

I'm assuming port 53 is blocked otherwise this wouldn't be a problem. Try a few other DNS servers to make sure it's not simply the Google ones that are blocked.

1. Run your own DNS server. Yeah, really. Play caching dns to the uni DNS. You'll still need to use it for machines you haven't used before, but the rest will remain known to and be authoritatively provided by your own DNS.

2. Purchase a VPN and run your traffic through it. The only DNS name you need to know is that of your VPN machine so one lookup tops and chances are its IP will remain constant so you can even just plonk it in the hosts file.

[Dom]

Turns out port 53 is blocked, I've started tunneling my traffic through which seems to be doing the trick even though it's against the University's ToS. *sigh*.