[ale] DNS issues

[Jim Popovitch]

On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 10:02 -0500, Geoffrey wrote:
> I placed a call to Speedfactory and they said they were going to look 
> into the dns issues.  Suddenly my dns issues have disappeared.  Anyone 
> else that was having problems see a difference?

I don't use SF, but I do have a BS DSL line as well as Comcast cable
modem at home.  Additionally I frequent various WiFi POPs around Atlanta
and also occasionally use my father's Charter cable modem.  Weekly I see
significant disruptions/slow-downs with DNS from many locations.  Given
the distributed nature of DNS it's hard to always pinpoint the problem,
however I believe that a lot of the problems I've seen are related to
UDP packets being dropped by busy routers.  I test this by measuring
ICMP, SSH and DNS queries to a common destination whenever I suspect
latency issues.  ICMP and DNS (UDP) will periodically fail while SSH
(TCP) goes through, albeit with some delay.

-Jim P.