On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 12:22 +0100, Andy Green wrote: > Your ISP DNS is likely going slow every now and again -- watch it with > tcpdump and see what you see. > > Whatever machine at your site talks to the ISP DNS server is often > giving up on the query before the response is received. Then I guess it > gives up and figures it's an NXDOMAIN. There's a thing called negative > TTL for DNS, basically if it got a response of NXDOMAIN once, it will > for a fixed time not bother to check again but immediately say NXDOMAIN > to queries. I guess this is where your "it doesn't exist no matter what > I do" period is coming from. > > Then after the negative TTL is exhausted, it will check again with your > ISP DNS, and depending on if your ISP DNS is fast enough or not, you > either get through or have another period of negative TTL timeout. > > Here's a suggestion: on the machine that talks to your ISP DNS, edit > resolv.conf to add > > nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx > options timeout:25 > > This will get your machine to wait up to 25 seconds for a response from > the ISP DNS server and should hopefully make the problem go away, if I > understood it right. Well, I'll keep this idea in mind; but usually when Firefox is problematic, the "can't get there" box comes up in about 1s...not as much/over 25s. But I appreciate the effort... -- Those who entrust life and limb to Microsoft deserve neither. -Me, 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Brian Fahrländer Christian, Conservative, and Technomad Evansville, IN http://www.fahrlander.net ICQ: 5119262 AIM: WheelDweller ------------------------------------------------------------------------