[HOWTO] - Speed up DNS lookups in OSX

[beef]

First of all, thanks for the tip...

everything's working... but when I reboot, it kinda gets stuck at "Starting Directory Services". The same thing happened when I was attempting to make changes to netinfo database before, so I guess it's for the same reason...

Anyway... it got stuck there long enough for me to do the dishes...

I don't need to reboot all that much, so it's not a big problem, but it's rather annoying when you have to go back to 9 then back to X, etc...

Am I the only one experiencing this? If anyone knows the solution, let me know.

[Darkshadow]

Hmm...Directory Services is what starts NetInfo and lookupd. It sounds like you may have a config problem.

Can you go to the terminal and type nidump -r / / and send me the text you get back from that? It spouts out your entire NetInfo domain. You can edit it to delete the user stuff from it - this will dump all your users, and while the passwords are encrypted, you probably don't want to send that part out.

Ya can either post it here, or PM me, or send it to me in an email. I'll take a look and see if I can figure out what may be going wrong.

[~vert]

Darkshadow, Try as I might, I can't get past the "nslookup" stage. It always returns:

[localhost:/var/named/pz] root# nslookup
Default Server: localhost
Address: 0.0.0.0

I also wonder if you have a typo in the directions. At the stage where it says:

niutil createprop . /locations/lookupd/agents/NILAgent TimeToLive 3600
niutil createprop. /locations/lookupd/agents/NILAgent Timeout 30

Should the second line read "createprop[space]. /locations..."? I tried it both ways but neither solved my problem.

Since I don't know what to do next, is there any harm in leaving all the config files and folders? Do I need to clean up to make sure that things work as smoothly as possible?

Thanks for the tutorial, wish it worked on my setup!!

[beef]

well... sorta typo in the instruction, I guess.. but it's long, bound to have a typo here and there...

some of the lines are missing "-" in front of the option "createprop"

[Darkshadow]

Whoops...you're right, that's a typo. I'll fix it - I'll also fix those missing "-"'s.

~vert - Hmm...did you restart NetInfo after the first part, and either disconnect/reconnect or edit the /var/run/resolv.conf file? You'll need to do both of those before it will work. If those don't fix it, go back and make sure that everything is exactly right. You can view the stuff you added into NetInfo by doing this: nidump -r /locations/lookupd / - that'll print out everything that you've added. Make sure everything is right there. If it is, then go and check all the config files you made for named. Make sure it's all correctly written down.

You can also open up Console.app and type ndc reload in the terminal. You'll see named starting up. If it spouts out any errors, check out what it tells you (it should inform you what part of the config files it's chocking on).

[~vert]

Darkshadow - It seems that the typos were the problem, although I also found there may be one in the dig command. When I run dig I get:

C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. ...[et al]

'SERVERS' is plural. I also found that it didn't work unless I typed the part shown above in capitals. I didn't think that would matter, but it did in my case.

Regardless, it is up and working - Thanks for your assistance! It's fun having stuff to mess with like this in a Mac. I'm beginning to become an 'aesthetic geek', to coin a phrase...

I also tried editing the crontab file, so we will see how that goes.

[beef]

hmm...

I just did

dig @a.root-servers.net. ns > file1
dig @A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. ns > file2

I don't see any difference in the files besides the query time and date.

[beef]

well, it's been awhile... anyway, I recently upgraded my Powerbook to 10.1, so I decided to give this tip a try on that machine.

(Note: I had problem with this on my desktop. It worked, but "Starting Directory Services" took hell of a wrong time...)

Anyway, to make the story short, as we all know, there's nothing wrong with the instruction given here, and it worked without a problem on my PB.

I wondered what the difference between my PB and DT is, and well, basically, I've made modifications to Netinfo on my DT system.

I had added some info under "machines", and although it was working, it seems that I did it in a wrong manner, and that didn't go well with the changes I made following this tip.

So I removed all the changes I made, then tried this again, and now it works great on both machines.

Looks like I need to spend more time reading about Netinfo...