[kwlug-disc] DNS getting hinky?

[unsolicited]

Paul Nijjar wrote, On 10/23/2009 6:41 PM:
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 04:09:18PM -0400, unsolicited wrote:
>> Anyone else experiencing intermittent DNS wonkiness?
>>
>> [At one point, I had the sense that people felt uunet had gone downhill / 
>> gotten slower, but that feeling reversed itself last year some time. It 
>> seems. Am I remembering correctly?]
> 
> I have never heard of uunet before. I'll get off your lawn now.

Long time Canadian backbone provider to ISPs. (Unix-Unix Network?) See 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uunet, but I don't believe uunet Canada, 
at least initially, was specifically related to uunet us. However, 
going to http://uunet.ca redirects to 
http://www.verizonbusiness.com/ca/. Seems to me uunet (ca) is part of 
Canarie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canarie) or vice versa, or there 
is some sort of association / proximity there. I only have vague fuzzy 
(mis?)information, others on the list will be able to speak more 
definitively and authoritatively than I. I'm probably confusing and 
overlapping Canadian (public?) internet backbone / infrastructure with 
Canarie.


>> There has been list discussions in the past regarding their preferred / 
>> favourite DNS servers, but I didn't have a real solid sense of a  
>> consensus.
> 
> Many of us were advocating OpenDNS. 

I'm tired of OpenDNS' redirection on failed searches. Let alone would 
you please just come back with 'not found' and let me correct my typo 
and get on with my day. Or search google.

Rogers DNS is the same, but worse.

>> For the moment, anyone else experiencing DNS weirdness? i.e. Do I need  
>> to be looking more closely internally?
> 
> We have been experiencing some real network slowdowns in general.
> Websites are taking a long time to load, I am losing my SSH
> connections, etc. Something's up, but I am not competent enough to
> understand what -- our traffic graphs look reasonably normal.

Thanks very much for posting Paul, we're both on Rogers, so I wonder, 
given your ssh comment, if we're running into a Rogers or a dropped 
connection issue. Good to know I'm not alone, though I agree not 
enough info (yet) to attribute blame. Merely vigilance.

Another poster mentioned the idea of running your own DNS server and 
avoiding the problem. I am, actually, running my own DNS server - 
however it has to go up the line too. Next hop for it (DNS-wise) - 
OpenDNS. Although it does make me wonder if the cache is timing out 
too fast. Looking at my named.conf nothing is specified, so I'm using 
the defaults. Whatever that is.

As I said in the initial post, darned strange that a ping or nslookup 
would resolve one moment, not the next, using uunet.ca. Unless some 
other network weirdness was going on.

Also, yahoo (group) requests are excruciatingly slow. Not timing out, 
but it can take minutes for a page to come in. Other tabs load their 
pages just fine, simultaneously. It does seem that yahoo is loading an 
excessive number of fiddly bits - firefox's status bar at the bottom 
is blinking very fast fetching bits from other links to draw the yahoo 
pages.

IIRC Yahoo is physically / network wise separate from Rogers. (But I 
do have to go through Rogers to get to them. You'd think that link 
would be optimized.)

If others notice hinkyness, list posts would be appreciated.