I have been a long-time linux user, primarily redhat, through redhat 9. I have recently decided to move to more recent systems, and have tried both SuSE 9.3 and now Fedora Core 4, which I am currently using (SuSE is _way_ too slow on my laptop, booting up).

My question is this: Using a web browser, the DNS stuff is _way_ slow. I've written a simple C program to use gethostbyname() and that runs just fine with nearly instant results. Ditto for a ping to something like mit.edu, which starts pinging almost instantly.

But when I use a web browser, such as firefox, each new URL takes _many_ seconds to resolve. When I run TCPDUMP there seems to be a lot of DNS activity spanning 10-15 seconds, before the web page starts to load. Since this happened on both SuSE and Fedora, and since it is only related to web browsing so far as I have noticed, I assume there must be some new sort of authentication/security/etc settings that are causing this.

Any ideas or suggestions? If I put the www URL address into /etc/hosts, the web pages for that web site load instantly. But not with something that hits an unknown host name. If I run named, the first probe of a web site takes forever, but subsequent ones apparently are handled from the named cache, so there is something very fishy going on...

thanks for any suggestions...

Nameserver trouble, most likely.

What does show you?