[Ham-Mac] Cool Free Utility called namebench

[David Kelly]

On Feb 14, 2012, at 11:38 AM, Dick Kriss wrote:

> I thought the same thing at first but I tried the namebench settings and they helped.  My router,gateway.2wire.net, is shown in the right side under Search Domains.  Maybe OS X uses the specified DNS servers rather than the settings in the router?

Mac OS is going to use the settings in System Preferences -> Network.

If you get your network configuration from your router via DHCP then you should define your preferred DNS servers in the router's DHCP config. The router itself doesn't need DNS unless you are using something like a dynamic DNS updater built into the firmware. It would need DNS to "phone home" to report your current IP numeric address.

Mac OS can easily override the selection of DNS servers provided via DHCP. Just select your network interface in the Network preference panel, then the Advanced... button, then the DNS tab. DNS servers set by your DHCP server (probably your router) will be listed in gray. If you use the + button to define DNS servers then they will be shown in full contrast. Use the - button to delete all and the DHCP values will be restored.

The caching DNS in my Mac Mini Server running Snow Leopard Server won with average response time under 2 ms. Others were better at the slowest reply so perhaps I should tweak the forwarding DNS entries on the server.

A similarly configured 400 MHz FreeBSD machine did better than the Mac Mini but had a longer longest reply which skewed the averages. It may well have had named paged out when first called from lack of use. Its running old FreeBSD 5.5 and has 192 MB of RAM.

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
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Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.