I’ve been noticing a lot of slowness that I’ve traced to DNS issues lately, typically with the caching DNS in routers. It happened to me, and it happened to my mom. We have different routers from different manufacturers, and they probably even use different embedded operating systems. Hers almost assuredly runs Linux; I have an oddball one that runs FreeBSD.
But the caching nameservers aren’t working well lately. I haven’t investigated why just yet. The solution I found was to hard-code the DNS settings on all my computers rather than letting them pull it from DHCP (my oddball router won’t let me specify external DNSs to use–lovely). Be sure to pick the best ones for your network.
Making that simple change fixed my mom’s dog-slow computer, and fixed my unreliable one.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.