strange behaviour of firefox

[Rick Stevens]

On 08/11/2011 04:54 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
> I appreciate Rick thinking to mention /etc/resolv.conf. I tend to
> forget it, especially since Fedora currently does so much (partial)
> hand-holding with the network setup widgets.
> 
> (Reindl is going to complain about my monologues again here, I'm afraid.)
> 
> On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 7:02 PM, François Patte
> <francois.patte at mi.parisdescartes.fr> wrote:
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>> Le 11/08/2011 00:16, Rick Stevens a écrit :
>>
>>>
>>> Have a look at your /etc/resolv.conf and make sure it's not adding a
>>> domain to your lookups via a "search home" or somesuch.
>>
>> Yes it does:
>>
>> domain home
>> search home
>> nameserver 192.168.1.1
>>
>> OK. Now I understand (except why cups escape this...)
> 
> Have you considered specifying an actual domain for your machine?
> 
> In an ideal world, ISPs would provide a default domain and hostname
> the user could optionally use, complete with dns resolution, to allow
> the user to set up a proper FQDN for their hosts (should they so
> desire).
> 
> For example, famousisp.com should provide new user newuser7734 with
> the right to use a name like newuser7734.rosegarden22.famousisp.net,
> and the setup option to have the IP address he is (possibly
> dynamically) assigned resolve to that address through the ISP's domain
> name services.
> 
> Then newuser7734 could have its domain set to
> rosegarden22.famousisp.net, and /etc/resolv.conf could have the FQDN
> in it and various things that fail in different ways when they can't
> figure out what the machine thinks its name is would quit failing.
> 
> Without the FQDN, in my opinion, the ISPs are not really providing an
> essential part of the package.
> 
> They don't provide it, which gives certain large vendors of
> proprietary OSses the opening to do stupid things that mess the net up
> for the rest of us, but also allows gratis dynamic dns services like
> dyndns.com and no-ip.com a foothold.
> 
> I finally got frustrated with the clunkiness of working on a host that
> can't resolve itself and signed up with a dynamic dns provider. dyndns
> allowed me to choose reiisi as a subdomain of homedns.org, so I use
> that and it solves a lot of problems for me. (I should be willing to
> pay something like USD 15 a year to get them to enable resolution of
> *.reiisi.homedns.org, but I'm too cheap so far.)
> 
> Anyway, it is possible to get the rights to use an FQDN, and it may be worth it.

There is a reason for this, Joel.  Most ISPs that deal with home users
use a loop polling mechanism to pick up data from end users and ship it
to the internet.  It's not like a normal network connection.  They're
optimized for "minimal upload, maximum download".  This is what aDSL
does as well (and where the "asymmetric" bit comes in).  I use Time
Warner cable at home myself, and I can always tell when they
oversubscribe the loop (and yes, it happens).

If an ISP offers DNS support of FQDNs, then they're opening the door
for people to set up websites, chat servers, mail servers, gaming sites
and the like at home--and the network is NOT designed to do that.  A
website generally has minimal incoming traffic and maximal outgoing
traffic.  This is exactly opposite of what a typical home web surfer
does.

ISPs which offered that "feature" ended up with a lot of their clients
abusing it in the manner I mention above.  The bandwidth usage went way
up, response time for their normal users went through the roof since the
polling loop was flooded with outgoing traffic and it left a horrible
taste in many mouths.  When the ISPs started tightening things down,
the abusers complained loudly and decimated the reputation of a lot of
the ISPs.  This is one reason @home.com died (well, that and giving
franchises to people who had no idea how to run an ISP).

If you want full bidirectional speed, FQDNs and the lot, most ISPs offer
a "business class" (for more money, of course).
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, C2 Hosting          ricks at nerd.com -
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-         "If you can't fix it...duct tape it!"  -- Tim Allen        -
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