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Much to my surprise, I was quickly able to get every piece of hardware working under Kalyway 10.5.2 on my new build a few days ago, but now there's one nagging problem making the OS almost unusable: the Internet is painfully slow. After a bit of searching around, I honed in on DNS issues as the culprit.

 

Once I do connect to a site, everything is lightning fast, and I'm getting download speeds of >2000 kbps. But when I initially type in a web address in Safari or Firefox, there is roughly a 20-second delay before anything starts loading. A quick Google search revealed plenty of Leopard users experiencing similar problems, and it seems to be due to 10.5.0-10.5.2 using "SRV" instead of "A" DNS lookups. (I have no clue what exactly that means, but it's definitely the problem I'm experiencing).

 

A common suggestion given to other users with the problem (on other message boards) is to reconfigure their router to use better DNS servers, such as OpenDNS.org. My problem? I'm using Internet provided by my apartment complex, and their router is not accessible to me. So what I need is either a) some way to force OS X to use the "A" lookup instead of "SRV," or ;) a way to force it to stop using the DNS servers provided by the router (which, again, I have no access to). One thing preventing me from doing the latter is that when I go into Network preferences and attempt to change DNS servers, there are two already listed (presumably provided by the router) that are greyed out and cannot be removed.

 

Thoughts?

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You shouldn't have any problem inputting a custom DNS server into network preferences.

 

It sounds like you may be going to the wrong place to enter in the information. Try clicking the "Advanced" button in network preferences, then Advanced. System Preferences > Network > Ethernet or Airport (whichever you use) > Advanced > TCP/IP.

You shouldn't have any problem inputting a custom DNS server into network preferences.

 

It sounds like you may be going to the wrong place to enter in the information. Try clicking the "Advanced" button in network preferences, then Advanced. System Preferences > Network > Ethernet or Airport (whichever you use) > Advanced > TCP/IP.

That's where I'm inputting the alternate DNS servers. But no matter what I put in, the problem persists exactly as it was before. The more I think about it, though, the more it makes sense that adding good DNS servers there is futile: if I'm going through a router, everything is going to first have to pass through the "bad" DNS server the router is configured to use. It looks like my only solution is to force OS X to stop using these "SRV" DNS addresses, so if anyone has a clue as to how I might do that, please tell!

 

The worst part? I upgraded to Kalyway 10.5.3 this afternoon, thinking that might solve the problem, since other users reported that OS X 10.5.3 went back to using "A" DNS requests. Nope! Same thing.

 

Again, the crux of the problem seems to be that unlike most people, I can't just upgrade my router's firmware or change its DNS servers myself - because I'm behind a router that distributes Internet to all the units in my apartment building. Very frustrating.

That's not how DNS works. The router only provides its own DNS servers over DHCP as a convenience to the hosts on the inside. Any request to a DNS server is sent over standard TCP/IP, the router doesn't even get involved.

 

Looking at the control panel now, I see that mine also shows the DNS servers from my DHCP server without an option to remove them. It must be standard MacOS behavior. If you really want to remove the DNS servers from your computer, you may try giving yourself a static IP within your apartment complex. Just set your IP address to whatever it is now, with 250 as the last number instead (eg. 192.168.1.250), and all other parameters the same. This way, you can get on their network without getting that DNS server through DHCP, and because you're using close to the last IP address in the range, their router will (probably) never attempt to give out the address you've taken to someone else.

 

I doubt it will help, though, as it's likely that what's slowing you down isn't even the DNS server's fault, it's probably the fault of your distro's DNS stack, which is attempting to resolve every address locally first (through Bonjour) before trying the DNS server. Local resolution is slow, because it doesn't rely on a central server, and for this reason should always be the last type of resolution performed. Why one distro would do it differently doesn't make sense to me.

 

I don't understand, though, I'm using an identical disribution and I'm not having a similar problem.

 

Try updating to 10.5.4 using apple software update if you're using a vanilla kernel.

Updated to 10.5.4 with Software Update. Also tried manually setting my IP (to get rid of the router-assigned DNS addresses) and adding OpenDNS servers manually. No difference. Still a 20-second delay, then finally the IP is resolved through the OpenDNS server. Oh well - guess it's back to WinXP, which works perfectly on the exact same connection, unless someone has any other ideas.

hi!

 

You can try this, open network preferences and set manually all the fields, ip, subnet, router, and in "dns servers" use in the first place your router ip again. (sorry for my bad english)

 

Something like this

 

ip = 192.168.1.xxx

sub = 255.255.255.0

router= 192.168.1.1

 

dns= 192.168.1.1, ........

 

the problem is in some kind (f.e. "amper XAVI 7868r" in spain) of routers and the "dns relay"

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