[ale] Namebench

[Chris Fowler]

On Tue, 2012-02-21 at 11:54 -0500, James Taylor wrote:
> That said, what is it supposed to do? I'm operating on the assumption that there must be something that caused you to think it had enough value to make the extra effort.

Namebench is a program to benchmark DNS.  It will then print out the top
3 DNS servers.  You put those entries in /etc/resolv.conf

http://linuxaria.com/howto/namebench-dns-server-benchmark?lang=en

It looks at your browser history and does tests resolving sites you
typically visit.  What I see on my desktop is a lot of "Waiting on ..."
in Firefox.  When I see that I know it is time to run this program again
and update the resolv file.


What I'm seeing is that the top 3 are not always the top 3.  This is
understandable.  I need to run namebench every few days.  Doing this
manually requires that I remember to do it and take time.  Instead I
wrote a perl script to automate the process and modify /etc/resolv.conf.
I then added an entry to crontab to run this every night.

Here is example output from a run I just completed:

Recommended configuration (fastest + nearest):
----------------------------------------------
nameserver 4.2.2.2         # Level 3/GTEI-2  
nameserver 209.244.0.4     # Level3-R2  
nameserver 4.2.2.5         # Genuity BAK 

After looking at the CLI options of the Python program it appears the
wrapper is not needed.  It can write directly to resolv.conf.

Chris