Or rather, still. I’ve noticed that my Internet connection has had leaky tubes lately. I tracked the problem down to DNS. I did quick search on “DNS problems Bellsouth,” and found that my old post on the subject was number two, but number one was a post at Tony Spencer’s place from over a year ago with several recent comments.

The weird thing is that the problem is primarily on my Windows box. My Fedora machine seems to be fine (it obviously has a different DNS setup, that I’ll have to dig into, to see what it’s doing right, and Windows is doing wrong. When I check my speed at C/Net, it tells me I’ve got a 1.5 Mbit connection, so it’s very frustating to have slow loads of pages because the machine can’t find the IP.

[Update about 7:30 EST]

In rereading my old post, I found this recent comment to it:

…did anyone notice that the DNS problems began about the same time they got to work for the NSA et al. Since I’m writing this in October 2006 and this thread started in December 2004, I assume they’ve had plenty of time and complaints to have long ago solved this issue if they had any intention of doing so.

Just so everyone knows, the DNS problem is still there. I live in southeast GA, and there is a minimum five full second (5.0s) responses to DNS queries. Contrast that with my Comcast DNS response times of (0.05s). So my 256KB/256KB Comcast connection is 100x faster at responding to DNS queries than my 6MB/384KB Bellsouth connection.

This thread is two years old, and this problem persists. Maybe everything is actually working but the NSA has to approve your DNS request first 🙂 There is no valid technical reason for this level of a problem for this length of time. And it doesn’t matter what time of day it is, so the DNS workload defense doesn’t hold up.

PS: Bellsouth did eventually deny participation, but as far as I know for certain, there were only two companies that actually refused the unconstitutional demands and bellsouth wasn’t one of them, but Google was !! Too bad google won’t just give us all free DNS, imagine the statistics they could derive from that. Oh well, PEACE netizens.

I don’t tend to be the paranoid type, but I’m wondering if there is indeed something to this.

[Update about 8:30 PM EST]

OK, Bellsouth DNS is officially fscked. I noted that my Linux machine was hardwired to use 4.2.2.2 as primary DNS, with the Bellsouth servers as secondary. I changed the Windows machines from “get DNS servers from the service” to primary 4.2.2.2 with a Bellsouth backup, and all is well. But I probably should set up my Linux box as a DNS server, to obviate these problems in the future, since I seem to have a good general Internet connection. For that matter, I need to get a better mail server than Bellsouth, which won’t allow me to access the SMTP server when I’m not on their network. Anyone have any suggestions?