Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Sometimes I find that websites either load slowly or not at all - and I wonder if DNS is at fault.

When this problem occurs I open a terminal and "ping 8.8.8.8" - which I believe is the Google dns server.
If that seems to be responding ok i then "ping 1.1.1.1" - which I believe is the Cloudflare dns server.

Tonight when I did this - i saw that the responses from Cloudflare were very much faster than the responses from the Google dns server.

So my question is: if I would like my browser to use Cloudflare rather than some other preset - how do I do this? Do i need to reconfigure and reset my router? Or is there some setting in Puppy that may override what the router is serving up?

I should already know this but my old brain is getting hazier and hazier as time goes on...

@greengeek

I have had similar issues over the past 72 hours

You can change the DNS inside your browser, all of them will allow you do so.

Alternatively, you can place a script in your Startup directory to specify your preferred DNS resolver.

Finally, your router should have an option to set the DNS too.

@greengeek

If your homepage is lagging try using a lighter one eg:

https://www.duckduckgo.com/lite

@greengeek

I should already know this but my old brain is getting hazier and hazier as time goes on.

You can also set your DNS server if you use a static IP address.

wizard

You can bypass lookup of a dns server
by using the /etc/hosts file

for example, in a terminal:

# nslookup puppylinux.com
Server:		127.0.0.1
Address:	127.0.0.1:53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	puppylinux.com
Address: 162.241.244.127

So, if you edit /etc/hosts adding the line

162.241.244.127 puppylinux.com

then it will first look in the hosts file for the url address
and if found, it won't need to get the address from a dns server.
The hosts file should be much faster than a dns server on the internet.

The internet connection probably needs to be restarted
for the change to take effect.

This may or may not work if you have a vpn configured,
or if running dnsmasq, or you configure your browser
to use a specific dns server.

Even if your dns server is broken and not responding,
the modified hosts file would allow you to access the forum.

If the address for puppylinux.com gets changed,
you would need to put the new address in hosts,
or it won't work (access to the forum would be effectively blocked)

williams2 wrote: Tue Aug 20, 2024 6:35 pm

So, if you edit /etc/hosts adding the line

162.241.244.127 puppylinux.com

then it will first look in the hosts file for the url address
and if found, it won't need to get the address from a dns server.

I have it in my mind that in the old days we could enter the IP address of the old murga forum direct into the url field and get straight to the forum when dns servers were dodgy - but I just tried this with 162.241.244.127 and got a 404.

Am I doing this wrong?

Have things changed as a result of IPV6?

Or is that host file method you describe the proper way of going straight to an IP?

A newer browser like Firefox
might by default block a url that is a numeric address.
Malware sites and ad servers often are referenced with a numeric address.

My links text browser also isn't working with numeric web addresses.

The hosts file should link urls to numeric addresses,
for example, 127.0.0.1 localhost
but should work with www addresses as well as local addresses.

I'm not sure what has changed, it used to work.

The original Murga forum was on a virtual private server and it hosted just the forum phpBB2.

This version of the forum is running on a shared host server so multiple users are on each shared server. This might be the cause of the 404.

To make your browser use Cloudflare instead of Google, you don’t necessarily need to fiddle with your router. You just need to change the DNS settings directly in your system’s network settings. Replace the existing DNS addresses with Cloudflare’s (1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1), and it should speed things up.
It’s a bit like when you want to massively follow on Twitter, you don’t need to recreate an account, you just adjust the settings to get what you’re looking for! And don’t worry about memory, even an old hard drive can get its speed back with the right setting!