Viraj's Weblog

Recently I've been noticing slowdowns when browsing on my Bellsouth DSL connection. I let it slide for awhile thinking they may be overloaded from time to time. Now it just got so bad, it was taking literally a minute to resolve sites like slashdot.org and timing out on many sites.

I started using dig to look into this further. The DNS servers Bellsouth normally gives me are:

205.152.144.23
205.152.132.23

The following command attempts to contact a DNS server 205.152.144.23 to resolve the address (a) record of www.slashdot.org:

dig @205.152.144.23 www.slashdot.org a

Running this repeatedly was taking a few seconds to return results, and many times would just timeout. DNS replies should generally be less than 1 second, especially after the DNS server caches the lookup. Bellsouth appears to be doing something funky, almost like they are not caching anything. I didn't notice any packet loss from me to their DNS server, so it doesn't appear to be network related.

It turns out I am not alone in my problems. Bellsouth's ridiculous problem reporting form asks me what number I am dialing. WTF? And look at their 'Date of trouble' drop down. It turns out I can only report problems that happend in 2003. I managed to find another form and I sent in my report.

For now, I just ended up using a DNS server at a previous company I worked for. As soon as I made that change, browsing became MUCH faster, and no more DNS timeouts. Ideally I would run my own DNS server, but I have no system here to do so .