DNS timings too quick?

[julianhayward]

I've had this problem with the current and previous Wingate.

Using Wingate as a DNS (and DHCP) server to my small network. Connected in turn through the WIngate server to 2 way Direcway sat Internet.

In the activity screen I see lots (3-4 accumulate) DNS lookups for anything such as pop.mail.yahoo.com and very quickly after I see an equal number of DNS lookup unknown errors. For very popular/obvious sitenames that should work!

I suspect that the latency on the sat link is the problem and Wingate is timing out each lookup too quickly and repeating it. Can I increase the timeout delay?

Odder still - it should be caching the lookups when it gets a successful return, which would lessen the problem. But if I repeatedly fire off mail check from a local PC I can see each time Wingate appears to fetch the DNS over from the remote DNS server - why isn't it caching and reusing the address?

Some of the NAT PCs on the lan are Macs - that seems to make things worse as they don't wait anytime at all before firing off DNS lookup repeated requests.

Any ideas anyone?

[kalvos]

In the activity screen I see lots (3-4 accumulate) DNS lookups for anything such as pop.mail.yahoo.com and very quickly after I see an equal number of DNS lookup unknown errors. For very popular/obvious sitenames that should work!
I suspect that the latency on the sat link is the problem and Wingate is timing out each lookup too quickly and repeating it. Can I increase the timeout delay?

No ideas, but I am seeing this as well, with a cable modem. A second try gets the DNS info.

The sites it fetches from the hosts file are no problem -- only when it goes to the remote DNS does the problem occur.

Dennis

[tjgulman]

\I've also seen this on my installation of 5.2. In one case, I had temporarily unplugged the network cable from my Wingate server and during that time, another machine with Outlook express tried to check for new mail. The same DNS message scrolled and scrolled through the activity screen of Gatekeeper for more than 10 minutes until I plugged in the cable again. I would have expected Wingate to give up after some period of time. The POP request had timed out in 180 seconds, but the DNS test kept going.

Is there anyway to configure this? The DNS session timeout is set to 60 seconds but it doesn't seem to apply in this case.

In another case, I think I had a problem with my ISP's DNS server, as the DNS messages were being generated faster than Wingate could process them. The DNS nessages were not there the next morning. so I assume that the ISP fixed their DNS server.

Tom

[adrien]

in these cases, how many DNS servers are configured in WinGate or in the OS of the machine running WinGate?

It is possible that you have a server defined in there that is not responding, or worse, not running a DNS server - that would result in socket errors in sending to the server in our DNS resolver.

Can you check that the DNS server you are using is valid, and that there aren't any others specified that aren't working?


Adrien

[kalvos]

in these cases, how many DNS servers are configured in WinGate or in the OS of the machine running WinGate?

Been there. :) I had it auto-configured and DHCP from the cable modem system. So I switched it to three known DNS servers (in both network config and WinGate). I used the 2 DNS servers at my ISP and the 1 DNS server on my own dedicated web server at pair Networks.

The behavior is exactly the same.

In fact, since it's morning here, when I checked this forum the first time, it hung on DNS. Wait a few seconds, try again, and voila.

Dennis