Ever found yourself knee-deep in a routing incident at 3 AM, frantically switching between terminals and browser tabs trying to piece together BGP data? I’ve been there. You’re chasing down a routing anomaly, your coffee’s gone cold, and you’re clicking through endless forms just to figure out which AS is announcing that suspicious prefix.

What if I told you that instead of switching between terminals and browser tabs, you could use natural language to describe the problem, and then ask the computer to do the work for you?

I’m happy to announce a simple yet effective command-line DNS benchmarking tool I’ve recently developed: dns-benchmark. This project was directly inspired by the outstanding work of Steve Gibson and his well-known DNS Benchmark utility. Steve’s meticulous attention to detail in benchmarking DNS performance motivated me to create something similar, but tailored specifically for the command line.

This CLI tool, written in Go, allows individual users to quickly test and compare various recursive DNS servers, checking key metrics such as latency, reliability, DNSSEC validation, and even response correctness—like detecting servers that hijack NXDOMAIN responses.