Our router is being silly. It’s a little Netgear DG834G, with a firewall, wireless AP and DSL modem inside a tiny box. It’s very cute, but also rubbish.

When I get an IP address off it to connect to the internal network, it also tells me to use the router as the DNS server, to resolve host names into IP addresses. This doesn’t appear to work very well, as it takes about 5 seconds to resolve domain names each time you click on a link in a web page. This means the web browser has to sit there for five seconds before it can even attempt to start downloading the web page. This gets a bit annoying after a while, to say the least.

So now I’ve told my computer to ignore what the router tells it and to use Pipex’s DNS servers instead, and it’s all fine again. The router clearly has to pass DNS queries that it receives through to them anyway, so what’s the point in it taking the request in the first place? It just slows things down. Silly silly router, silly silly Netgear.

Currently listening to: What You Waiting For? by Gwen Stefani on Kerrang. I love this song!
Chances of them playing it at Top B tonight: Minimal 🙁