Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:

> It's the most versatile and reliable tool around for testing DNS
> functionality -- which in turn is useful to be able to test separately
> from the separate task of actually making connections for services after
> resolving DNS names to find where to reach them.

+1 for that - it's my "go to" tool for anything that could be even remotely DNS related, and for many non-DNS related issues as well.

And I'll add wget or curl (according to preference) to actually download a web page rather than your browser. It a) tells you what it's doing, b) doesn't cache the results to cause confusion, and c) it doesn't (unless you tell it to) download all the linked files.

So dig can tell you where the server is, wget or curl will tell you how a web server is performing.


Oh yes, looking at the list presented earlier, one thought that went through my mind was "aren't those well performing ones all using a CDN ?"



Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???> wrote:

>> search austin.rr.com

> Is this what gets prefixed to every non-qualified domain name in the search attempt so as to allow abbreviated short names?


My first thought was that it's been put there by the ISP to direct all short names to a search engine type of page that they provide - eg if someone puts just "Microsoft" into the broaser address bar, the browser will then go to microsoft.austin.rr.com and they'll present a search page of possible destinations the user might have wanted. However I see no A records, and this seems to be broken - so I wonder if this is perhaps an element in the problem.



Rowland Penny <rpenny@???> wrote:

>>> And OT do I even need avahi installed at all?

>> What is it needed for?

> I do not really know, if you have DNS set up correctly, it isn't required and guess who wrote it ?

I disagree with that. Firstly it can be very useful - eg it's easier for most people to simply send their print job to (eg) "lj1320.local." than to find out how to statically configure the printer and directly use it's IP address. It's even more work to statically configure the printer (or the DHCP server to give it a static assignment) AND set up the local DNS so you can print to (eg) "lj1320.mydomain.com".
And of course, mdns will also automagically use IPv6 if both devices properly support it. There's definitely an advantage to not exposing most users to IPv6 addresses.

As to who wrote it, even given the reason for the existence of Devuan it's getting a bit paranoid to reject something just for that reason.