One of the shortcomings of OS X (as delivered) is that it doesn’t maintain a cache of the URLs you visit so every time you visit them (this forum for example) your browser has to go to your ISP’s DNS server to translate bbs.applescript.net into 216.52.182.114 to find the MacScripter Server. At the same time, OS X has a built-in name server called “BIND”, but it’s off by default, and not trivial to set up.
Meant every word of it - it really is much faster, perhaps accentuated because my ISP’s DSN servers can be slow sometimes. In Pre OS X days, I used a host file maintenance program called Hostel that speeded things up a bit and provided filtering too. BIND is a substantial improvement, but it’s very brief man page doesn’t get a newbie anywhere.
well thanks again. i run a caching DNS server at home on my Linux server, and have always used DHCP to enable my local users to do this kind of thing, but at work i was at a loss as to why my surfing was so slow. one day i could not surf at all, and this script is the result of that frustration, since although i could do the macosxhints article with no problem it seemed to me that it was beyond many users on that forum. i may post a link from there to the codexchange page since there are many postings from users having problems.
this was a great project & i learned a lot. i’d still like to put the DNS server in the Network Preference Pane, but i’m resigned to things the way they are. maybe in Leopard.
btw–i posted new code that includes an Uninstaller. the new Uninstaller is capable of Uninstalling a machine that was configured with the old Installer.
