Improve DNS lookup time under Ubuntu 11.04

Oleg Puzanov — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 07:52:57 +0000

A lot of people complain about weird problems with DNS resolving speed under Ubuntu while surfing the Internet - it could takes a long time to access a new site, but when it is finally loaded, further browsing on that site is good. It doesn’t depends on the browser – Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera – load pages quite slowly for the first time. Besides, your network seems to be ok – ping time is acceptable, download speed is good.

Familiar situation?

There are a lot of solutions proposed on different blogs and forums – most popular among them are disabling ipv6 both in Ubuntu and FF, using alternative DNS resolution service (like Google Publis DNS), playing with MTU parameter of your connection, etc. But unfortunately, nothing works for me.

Finally, I found a solution for this problem. It was in nsswitch.conf - system databases and name service switch configuration file.

Try the following:

cat /etc/nsswitch.conf | grep hosts

Output will be like this:

hosts: files wins mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

It means, that first Ubuntu will check files records (like /etc/hosts), then wins, then mdns4_minimal and finally dns. These records were added by Samba, so everything what we should do is change their order to:

hosts: files dns mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] wins mdns4

Reboot to apply changes.

Webmin – web console for Unix system administration

Oleg Puzanov — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:55:49 +0000

Yesterday, I tried to find some tool to simplify my home Ubuntu server management. After small research I chooses Webmin – free, simple and powerful tool that fit my needs. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely.

It works under many popular platform – Red Hat, Debian/Ubuntu, Free BSD and even Solaris. Also, it has a lot of third-party modules and themes, so it can be easy customizable and expandable.

Installation for Ubuntu as simple as is:

sudo apt-get install webmin

Webmin demo and screenshots.
Webmin documentation.

Oleg Puzanov » ubuntu

Improve DNS lookup time under Ubuntu 11.04

Webmin – web console for Unix system administration