Porchside Musings.

 I thought I'd share some useful info for home computers. Sometimes your internet access may seem sluggish, it just takes forever  to get to websites. But once there things are snappy. It's not the network per se, it's DNS - the magic that takes your requested connection name and turns it into the an IP address that can be then used to connect to. Your service provider may have a DNS server that is overloaded, in turn giving you poor lookup speeds. Normally the location of the DNS server is set for you automatically at boot time and almost universally it's a machine owned by the IP provider. There may be dozens of them, each serving a small chunk of their network. Which is great for them, not so hot if that server taking your requests is not doing too well. If you are up for doing a little magic you can bypass the automatic setting for DNS and put in your own entries. There are a number of big DNS servers out there that available for open use. I use the pair offered by