Thursday, July 22, 2010

Firefox does pretty agressive DNS pre-fetching

As I am performing some real-world testing with the (hopefully) soon-to-be-released Deadwood 2.9.01, I discovered something interesting that Firefox does.

The copy of Firefox 3.6.4 I have [1] in CentOS 5 looks at all of the links on a given page I am reading, and uses DNS to look up the hostnames of all of the links. This way, if I click on a given link, I don’t have to wait for the DNS lookup to be performed. I can see why Firefox implemented this.

Anyway, I usually don‘t announce snapshots here, but I am very pleased that Deadwood is finally, after nearly three years, a fully recursive DNS server. Snapshots are here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/

Look in the snap directory for the latest snapshot.

Todo before releasing Deadwood 2.9.01:
  • Make a quick Deadwood FAQ
  • The usual Deadwood SQA regressions I do before any release
(Footnote follows)

[1] Yes, I know, the current version is Firefox 3.6.7, but I’m using CentOS 5, whose most current version of Firefox is 3.6.4. Out-of-date versions of programs is a very common problem in Linux, since the distributor of a given program has to approve and then send a program downstream before the users of the distribution get the update. It’s worse with CentOS, where a given update has to get approved by RedHat, then, in turn, processed by CentOS before it gets here.

One issue I have had a lot with MaraDNS is that people sometimes email me or post to the mailing list bug reports for issues I have already fixed, but the user in question is using the version of MaraDNS that comes with Debian or whatever, which hasn’t been updated.