In preparation for some robotics I've dug out my Raspberry Pi 2 B and I'm reacquainting myself with it. Tonight's goal: Boot up an old Raspbian Squeeze SD card and get the Pi to identify on the LAN with a domain-name -- rather than having to learn it's IP address -- using avahi (AKA Bonjour or zero-conf mDNS networking).
In a previous blog entry I described setting up a caching-only DNS server to speed up hostname resolution on Debian systems. I've recently been playing with Ubuntu and noticed that this hack is not working.
After 3 years of sticking with Novell, I recently switched away from openSUSE to Debian. There are a few reasons why, but I won't bore you with them. So far I'm liking it. There are a few things to set up before I settle in, and one is slow DNS lookup.
Lately I've been noticing significant DNS latency when visiting certain sites. This is most obvious when my browser spends ages with "Looking up some.web.server.com..." in it's status bar. It's particularly bad at sites like wordpress.com where many pages make reference to sub-domains of wordpress.com and typically also to google.com for analytics or ads.
While my ISP's DNS infrastructure is pretty good, there are a couple of things I can do to improve DNS look-up, which makes page loads a lot quicker.