New Outage Hits Comcast Subscribers

Fri Apr 15 12:59:07 UTC 2005

Jerry,

Too late. Every Mac ships with a working version of BIND. Its not enabled by
default, but it can be turned on with a few keystrokes.

If you take a look at the dslreports.com forums, there are numerous
complains about DNS performance from various DSL and cable modem users. I'm
not sure how reasonable these complains are. The usual solution from other
users is to install a piece of Windows software called "Treewalk" which will
magically cure their problems.

Guess what "Treewalk" is? Yep, its a freeware recursive DNS server (
http://ntcanuck.com/). I have no idea how well behaved it is, but its
getting deployed pretty widely on user's machines.

I also wonder how long it will be before home routers have DNS servers
built-in, with a switch to let users select between iterative queries of
their upstream's DNS and a normal recursive query. Has anyone seen this in
the consumer market?

- Dan

On 4/15/05 1:45 AM, "Jerry Pasker" <info at n-connect.net> wrote:

> 
>> On Apr 15, 2005, at 1:13 AM, Jerry Pasker wrote:
>> 
>>> Jeff Cole wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Run bind locally on your laptop. There's a Win32 version available
>>>> if you're not running some sort of Unix or Linux on there. It's
>>>> what I do as my ISP's DNS is wonky at times, as is $ork's as they
>>>> choose to use Active Directory for DNS.
>>> 
>>> For the sake of the root servers, I hope everyone doesn't start doing this.
>> 
>> Well configured laptops will not put that much pressure on the
>> roots.  A single misconfigured / broken recursive name server puts a
>> lot more pressure on the roots than lots of well-configured laptops.
>> 
>> I guess one could argue that the chance of misconfiguration go up as
>> the number of systems goes up.
>> 
>> --
>> TTFN,
>> patrick
> 
> I didn't say "I hope a few cluefull people don't do this."  I said "I
> hope _everyone_ doesn't start doing this."  Big difference.
> 
> For the sake of the net, I hope no one, not even a semi popular OS
> venduh, gets the idea to build a dns server in to their next OS some
> day.

-- 
Daniel Golding
Network and Telecommunications Strategies
Burton Group