Fixing S L O W Browsing with Firefox and Cox DNS Servers (Geeky Baldisms)

I recently switched from AT&T DSL to Cox Internet. My download speed went from about 900k to speeds which vary from 3 meg (when usage is high) to nearly 20 meg (early in the morning). However, surfing didn't speed up much, if any at all.

The issue was that I would spend much time looking at "Looking up google.com" in the bottom bar of Firefox. In a word, Cox's DNS servers here in NW Arkansas are horrible.

The fix to that was to set up other DNS servers in my Belkin router. However, for some reason, the router wouldn't propagate the changes to my /etc/resolv.conf file. It continued to list the three slow Cox DNS servers and nothing else.

My fix could have been as simple as editing the file. However, I decided to dial things up a notch by installing dnsmasq. It's a local DNS cache that will greatly speed up name lookups.

Here's how to do it the GUI way:

Install dnsmasq with Synaptic Package Manager.

Now sudo gedit /etc/resolv.conf.

Here's what mine looks like:

domain Belkin
search Belkin
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 4.2.2.1
nameserver 4.2.2.2
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
nameserver 192.168.2.1
nameserver 68.105.28.11
nameserver 68.105.29.11
nameserver 68.105.28.12

The domain and search entries were made automatically by my DHCP service on my machine, as were the final four entries. However, the last three are the bad Cox DNS servers. I added the localhost entry and the rest. The first two are lightning-fast DNS servers which came recommended by Google searches. The next two are Opendns servers.

Restart the dnsmasq service and try dig yahoo.com a couple of times from the command line. You should see a fairly fast initial time, a near-instantaneous second one, as you are now reading from the locally cached DNS.

The second speedup involves Firefox, which had become suddenly sluggish since a recent update. I am now running 3.0.4, BTW.

The sluggish behavior was really evident in tab switching. It might take ten seconds to switch from one tab to another, this with only two tabs open!

The problem lie in ipv6 somehow getting turned on. The instant fix is simply turning it off.

Type about:config into the address bar and hit enter.
Blast past the warning.
Paste network.dns.disableIPv6 into the Filter bar.
Look for the network.dns.disableIPv6 entry in the table below.
Double click the network.dns.disableIPv6 entry to disable it.
Restart Firefox.

Your web surfing experience should have just sped up by a quantum leap. Enjoy!