slow to open a web page, last too long to 'looking up ...'

[Andy Green]

Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> Hi,
> 
> I experienced a slow web page openning. When I try to open a web page eg
> http://home.aapt.com.au, It starts 'looking up home.aapt.com.au
> <http://home.aapt.com.au>, this lasts more than 40 seconds then to start
> 'transfer from home.aapt.com.au <http://home.aapt.com.au>. VERY SLOW.
> However, if I got the ip adddress of this, eg
> http://203.63.89.59 <http://203.63.89.59>
> the 'looking up' lasts less than 2 seconds and start trasfer ...
> 
> I guess it may relate to the ISP dns, apart from the ISP side, what else
> I can improve this?

You can run your own cacheing DNS server very easily with Fedora.

Just install bind

# yum install bind caching-nameserver
# service named start
# chkconfig named on

Edit /etc/resolv.conf to say to use your own DNS

nameserver 127.0.0.1

...and that's it, you can test with ping

ping home.aapt.com.au

If your normal DNS server is unreliable, this is a great and fast fix.

-Andy