DNS problem -

[Tim]

Tim:
>> Unless you're doing something odd, the amount of traffic from DNS
>> data is minuscule compared to everything else.


Bob Goodwin:
> But what if they are caching stuff, e.g. foxnews, some popular video 
> clips, etc. and delivering them to the user without going through the 
> satellite loop? I don't know what they are doing but they claim to be 
> "optimizing" the system with their caching.

That'd be HTTP caching.  They don't need to subvert DNS records for you
to see cached websites.  Unless they're doing something stupid, your web
requests are still made of the original IPs, just the results are
cached.

I have the same thing, here, on my LAN.  A Squid proxy server, so that
if I have guests doing the "look at this" thing amongst themselves, or a
bunch of Windows PCs doing updates, everyone after the first query sees
the cached version.

You can try it out, and see.  Find a public DNS server that you can
access on a different-than-usual port.  Make a rule on your gateway that
connection attempts to your router IP and DNS port get redirected to the
external DNS server on the unusual port.  It's probably possible to make
an outgoing redirection rule on the PC that your testing, itself.

As far as them optimising things, with satellite internet, there's a
prolonged propagation delay.  So them doing local caching means that you
get to see cached data on this side of the satellite, rather than have
to wait for it to come through it.

Years ago I used an ISP that did that sort of thing, their service was
dreadful.  Everything was late, worse than dial-up.  Their crap
performance was the thing that pushed me into running my own DNS
servers.  Their DNS servers were even worse than their everything else
that they did.  Frequently, it could take half a minute for it to return
a result.  When you consider that way too many pages are a construct of
data from here, there, and everywhere, not just the sites own service,
it could take an age to load a page.

Any service that mucks you about, and fobs you off, and leaves you
trying to resolve a problem for days on end, doesn't deserve your
custom.  Especially if the problem is theirs.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
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