[Ham-Mac] Cool Free Utility called namebench

[Alan Hawrylyshen]

A cautionary tale for using fast DNS servers that are not close to home. 

Various technologies for content distribution use DNS tricks to ensure that when you ask for a particular host name, you are assigned an IP or host near you. 

This is used, for example, by iTunes for movie and music delivery as well as apple software updates. 

When I used name bench to find a faster name resolver, my appleTV and software updates became unusably slow since I was being assigned an overloaded download streaming source based on the (now inaccurate ) assumption that I was topologically close to the DNS server. This is a 'fault' in the design of CDNs but it is a nasty common design assumption. 

Caveat emptor 

Alan
K2ACK


Sent from my mobile device. 

On Feb 16, 2012, at 1:48, Dick Kriss <aa5vu at att.net> wrote:

> Rich KI4FW,
> 
> Thanks for the feedback. It is good to know the posting was useful and used.
> 
> 73, Dick AA5VU
> 
> On Feb 15, 2012, at 11:11 PM, Richard Cincotta wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Thanks for the tip on "namebench", Dick.  The app found a DNS that was 3,000+ times faster than the ones in my System Pref's DNS list.  
>> So, yes, I can very much tell the difference. 
>> 73, Rich KI4FW
>> 
>>> From: aa5vu at arrl.net
>>> Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:17:19 -0600
>>> To: ham-mac at mailman.qth.net
>>> Subject: [Ham-Mac] Cool Free Utility called namebench
>>> 
>>> If you get bored and want speed up your internet connection, try the free benchmarking utility from Google called namebench. 
>>> 
>>> http://code.google.com/p/namebench/
>>> 
>> 
> 
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