Hi:

Suse 9.1.

I switched to SBC/Yahoo DSL a few months ago. Big mistake. It's way
too consumer oriented.

I quickly got it working with my Linksys WRT54G router. I somehow
managed to find the DNS server addresses by Googling. Their stupid help
pages only tell one how to check that Windows has them set to automatic
via DHCP.

But I am not using DHCP. My LAN hosts thus have manually set DNS servers.

Everything seemed to be fine until suddenly about two weeks ago, web
surfing in Linux became severely slow. Like 30 seconds to load cnn.com.
Web pages *do* load, but only after a very long initial delay. After
that they actually fill in pretty quickly. Ping behavior is similar. A
very long time to do the initial lookup, then it runs fairly normal.
FTP downloads run at 300kB/s so there's no problem with the basic
networking. FTP within the LAN hits 11MB/s.

I was using the DNS servers from Yahoo/SBC:

63.203.35.55
206.13.28.12


Then I switched to the free DNS servers:

205.166.226.38
69.67.108.10

and things got a lot better, which leads me to suspect something wierd
is going on with the DNS. But with these free servers, web surfing is
still slower than when the SBC/Yahoo servers were working.

Of course, things work fine with Windows hosts within the LAN. Even a
Win2k inside a VMware on this Linux box surfs normally. Instant loading
with IE of most pages compared to 10-30 second waits on Linux. Oh,
problem is with both Mozilla and Konqueror web browsers.

Also, there were messages on the Suse mailing list about ipv6 being a
problem. I disabled ipv6 but the problem persists.

What can I do to take the next step fixing this?



--
_____________________
Christopher R. Carlen
crobc@sbcglobal.net
SuSE 9.1 Linux 2.6.5

Chris Carlen wrote:

> Suse 9.1.
>
> I switched to SBC/Yahoo DSL a few months ago.**Big*mistake.**It's*way
> too consumer oriented.

.... i used sbc/yahoo dsl approaching two years ago with
no issues. i suspect you dont have something configured
properly. you've set up PPPOE, right?

the one difference, and i assume since you didnt mention,
is that i used a router and set it up for PPPOE. however,
for a short period before the router, i did have a direct
connect (no router) using RP-PPPOE and for a brief stint,
using the Yast DSL module
--
<< http://michaeljtobler.homelinux.com/ >>
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing,
but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
-- Robert Benchley

On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 20:14:57 -0800, Chris Carlen wrote:

> Hi:
>
> Suse 9.1.
>
> I switched to SBC/Yahoo DSL a few months ago. Big mistake. It's way
> too consumer oriented.
>
> I quickly got it working with my Linksys WRT54G router. I somehow
> managed to find the DNS server addresses by Googling. Their stupid help
> pages only tell one how to check that Windows has them set to automatic
> via DHCP.
>
> But I am not using DHCP. My LAN hosts thus have manually set DNS servers.
>
> Everything seemed to be fine until suddenly about two weeks ago, web
> surfing in Linux became severely slow. Like 30 seconds to load cnn.com.
> Web pages *do* load, but only after a very long initial delay. After
> that they actually fill in pretty quickly. Ping behavior is similar. A
> very long time to do the initial lookup, then it runs fairly normal.
> FTP downloads run at 300kB/s so there's no problem with the basic
> networking. FTP within the LAN hits 11MB/s.
>
> I was using the DNS servers from Yahoo/SBC:
>
> 63.203.35.55
> 206.13.28.12
>
>
> Then I switched to the free DNS servers:
>
> 205.166.226.38
> 69.67.108.10
>
> and things got a lot better, which leads me to suspect something wierd
> is going on with the DNS. But with these free servers, web surfing is
> still slower than when the SBC/Yahoo servers were working.
>
> Of course, things work fine with Windows hosts within the LAN. Even a
> Win2k inside a VMware on this Linux box surfs normally. Instant loading
> with IE of most pages compared to 10-30 second waits on Linux. Oh,
> problem is with both Mozilla and Konqueror web browsers.
>
> Also, there were messages on the Suse mailing list about ipv6 being a
> problem. I disabled ipv6 but the problem persists.
>
> What can I do to take the next step fixing this?

try

options timeout:1

in your /etc/resolv.conf file. It seems as though the default timeout for
Linux is 5 seconds and some dns servers don't seem to catch Linux requests
the first time. Also make sure you have ipv6 disabled. The ipv6 disable
cut time on some mandrake systems I installed from about 45 seconds to
resolv to about 12 seconds - timeout cut it to virtually nothing.

ray wrote:
> try
>
> options timeout:1
>
> in your /etc/resolv.conf file. It seems as though the default timeout for
> Linux is 5 seconds and some dns servers don't seem to catch Linux requests
> the first time. Also make sure you have ipv6 disabled. The ipv6 disable
> cut time on some mandrake systems I installed from about 45 seconds to
> resolv to about 12 seconds - timeout cut it to virtually nothing.


Interesting. This does seem to result in a large improvement. From
about a 15 second wait for cnn.com and typical sites down to 2-3 seconds.

Thanks.

Still not quite right though, as Windows loads many sites too fast to time.


I'll keep investigating.


Good day!



--
_____________________
Christopher R. Carlen
crobc@sbcglobal.net
SuSE 9.1 Linux 2.6.5

On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 20:14:57 -0800, Chris Carlen wrote:

> I quickly got it working with my Linksys WRT54G router. I somehow
> managed to find the DNS server addresses by Googling. Their stupid help
> pages only tell one how to check that Windows has them set to automatic
> via DHCP.
>
> But I am not using DHCP. My LAN hosts thus have manually set DNS
> servers.
>
> Everything seemed to be fine until suddenly about two weeks ago, web
> surfing in Linux became severely slow. Like 30 seconds to load cnn.com.
> Web pages *do* load, but only after a very long initial delay. After
> that they actually fill in pretty quickly. Ping behavior is similar. A
> very long time to do the initial lookup, then it runs fairly normal. FTP
> downloads run at 300kB/s so there's no problem with the basic
> networking. FTP within the LAN hits 11MB/s.

Since the WRT54G has a DNS server onboard, you should configure your LAN
hosts to use it (192.168.1.1) for DNS. This will solve the problem of
future DNS changes because the WRT54G picks up DNS peer details from your
ISP every time it renews your public ip address (the same way a windows
client with direct connection would do).

Chris Carlen wrote:

> ray wrote:
> > try
> >
> > options timeout:1
> >
> > in your /etc/resolv.conf file. It seems as though the default timeout
> > for Linux is 5 seconds and some dns servers don't seem to catch Linux
> > requests the first time. Also make sure you have ipv6 disabled. The ipv6
> > disable cut time on some mandrake systems I installed from about 45
> > seconds to resolv to about 12 seconds - timeout cut it to virtually
> > nothing.
>
>
> Interesting. This does seem to result in a large improvement. From
> about a 15 second wait for cnn.com and typical sites down to 2-3 seconds.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Still not quite right though, as Windows loads many sites too fast to
> time.

AIUI Windows caches DNS (including transient fails).

If your ISP DNS servers like windows lookups better than Linux you could
use someone elses servers.

Andy.

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 08:49:05 +0000, Andy Furniss wrote:

> Chris Carlen wrote:
>
>> ray wrote:
>> > try
>> >
>> > options timeout:1
>> >
>> > in your /etc/resolv.conf file. It seems as though the default timeout
>> > for Linux is 5 seconds and some dns servers don't seem to catch Linux
>> > requests the first time. Also make sure you have ipv6 disabled. The ipv6
>> > disable cut time on some mandrake systems I installed from about 45
>> > seconds to resolv to about 12 seconds - timeout cut it to virtually
>> > nothing.
>>
>>
>> Interesting. This does seem to result in a large improvement. From
>> about a 15 second wait for cnn.com and typical sites down to 2-3 seconds.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Still not quite right though, as Windows loads many sites too fast to
>> time.
>
> AIUI Windows caches DNS (including transient fails).
>
> If your ISP DNS servers like windows lookups better than Linux you could
> use someone elses servers.
>
> Andy.

Yes, it is an interesting situation. My DSL carrier (Qwest) seems to
resolv almost instantly with linux. I've been doing some linux installs
for the internet access computers at the local libraries, and noted the
differences I mentioned above. The IPV6 issue was discussed several times
in the Mandrake news group, and I don't recall where I found the timeout
issue discussed, but I modified that on Monday of this week and found a
big difference. It seems as though some DNS servers usually timeout on the
first couple of requests from linux boxes.

Andy Furniss wrote:
> Chris Carlen wrote:
>
>
>>ray wrote:
>>
>>>try
>>>
>>>options timeout:1
>>>
>>>in your /etc/resolv.conf file. It seems as though the default timeout
>>>for Linux is 5 seconds and some dns servers don't seem to catch Linux
>>>requests the first time. Also make sure you have ipv6 disabled. The ipv6
>>>disable cut time on some mandrake systems I installed from about 45
>>>seconds to resolv to about 12 seconds - timeout cut it to virtually
>>>nothing.
>>
>>
>>Interesting. This does seem to result in a large improvement. From
>>about a 15 second wait for cnn.com and typical sites down to 2-3 seconds.
>>
>>Thanks.
>>
>>Still not quite right though, as Windows loads many sites too fast to
>>time.
>
>
> AIUI Windows caches DNS (including transient fails).
>
> If your ISP DNS servers like windows lookups better than Linux you could
> use someone elses servers.
>
> Andy.
>
I had similar problem. I have Roadrunner with Debian/unstable. The
problem started when i decided to run my own DNS server. it will be
crawling if i visit a web site for the first time, and after that
everything will be fine and this happened everyday. finally i decided to
shutdown my dns server and started to use the dns server of the
roadrunner. i don't know whether this answers your question or not, but
my opinion is there is nothing wrong in using the dns servers of your ISP.
jc

In article <cuc2o301h65@news1.newsguy.com>,
Chris Carlen <crobc@BOGUSFIELD.sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Everything seemed to be fine until suddenly about two weeks ago, web
> surfing in Linux became severely slow. Like 30 seconds to load cnn.com.
> Web pages *do* load, but only after a very long initial delay. After
> that they actually fill in pretty quickly. Ping behavior is similar. A
> very long time to do the initial lookup, then it runs fairly normal.
> FTP downloads run at 300kB/s so there's no problem with the basic
> networking. FTP within the LAN hits 11MB/s.
....
> Of course, things work fine with Windows hosts within the LAN.

Windows uses LMHOSTS, Linux doesn't. Maybe that's the difference.


--
-eben ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar

Q: What kind of modem did Jimi Hendrix use?
A: A purple Hayes.

Hactar wrote:

>> Of course, things work fine with Windows hosts within the LAN.
>
> Windows uses LMHOSTS, Linux doesn't.**Maybe*that's*the*difference.

Lmhosts can be used by both Linux and Windows, but neither needs it.
Normally it's only necessary, if the NetBIOS name is different from the IP
host name. There are five methods of NetBIOS name resolution.

1) Broadcast (only works on local lan)
2) DNS
3) WINS
4) hosts
5) lmhosts

There are some options, which control the methods used.