[vox-tech] On my boxes, Windows is outperforming Debian in network speed

[Ken Bloom]

On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 21:53:11 -0700 (PDT)
"Mark K. Kim" <lugod at cbreak.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 25 Jul 2004, Issac Trotts wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 12:24:00AM -0700, Mark K. Kim wrote:
> > > Don't put 127.0.0.1 as any of the name servers.
> >
> > Why not?  I have bind installed, and it gives me a big speedup on
> > name lookups when I put the line in my resolv.conf.  At least it
> > does now...  I don't know what was going wrong before.
> 
> Well, have you configured your local DNS server?  If not, it's useless
> to use 127.0.0.1 as a DNS server.
> 
> If you *have* configured the local DNS server, then you know that the
> local DNS server needs to fetch DNS of external hosts from somewhere
> outside of your network,

By default, it talks directly to the root servers if it doesn't know who
the host is -- no configuration needed.

This is how we could install our
own copies of bind to work around the verisign sitefinder. Our local
nameservers were simply patched to be able to ignore any answer from a
root nameserver that resolved a domain name to an IP address. (Normally
the root nameservers do the equivalent of saying "I don't know the IP
address, but I do know who to ask", so our nameservers were patched to
ignore any response where the nameserver actually knew the IP address.)

So it's actually not bad, and if you have a very high latency to your
ISP's DNS server (e.g. it's overloaded for some reason), then installing
your own nameserver can bypass that delay.

> and that's an extra routing that should SLOW DOWN
> your queries, not make it faster.  Unless, of course, there's caching,
> which I guess may be what's happening.
> 
> Either way, it appears to me that adding 127.0.0.1 is not targetting
> the root of the speed problem, just creating a way around it.  But if
> everything works fine now it's probably best to leave it alone... =P



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