The Archist

I came and logged in to The Archist this morning to check for any new comments and was very surprised by what I saw. Normally I would check the comments by just looking at the post for the comment link, today after logging in I saw a much higher number of comments than I knew of. Turns out I had quite a few in the spam filter.

Looking through those comments, I found several comments which appear to be real marked as spam. I’m not sure how they got marked, they all seemed perfectly normal and on-topic to me. Marking them as Not Spam will hopefully train the filter better. Until then, I’ll have to make sure I check these things more in-depth from now on.

That all said, if your comment was caught in the filter, I apologize for not releasing them sooner. I’ll certainly be checking things here more to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

A few months ago, back while getting ArchLinux set up on my main system, I stumbled across a very nice piece of software. It is a DNS server proxy which will cache it’s results for near instant DNS lookups after the first. The software I am speaking of is pdnsd. The arch wiki has a very detailed guide to installing and configuring the software, a link is provided at the bottom.

After using this software for some time, I can say it seems to make my internet access a little snappier. Of course actual download speeds aren’t effected, but once a site is in the DNS cache I can sometimes get almost a quarter of a second quicker on the DNS lookup. It just makes the internet feel a little more responsive and leaves me overall feeling pleased with it’s performance.

One thing I do have to mention. I use network manager to access my wireless network and I had pdnsd set up properly for a while, but network manager was setup to use whatever dhcp provided. The issue wasn’t totally apparent at first, but all remaining bits of lag in Firefox seemed to disappear after I changed that setting.

Is there anyone else who regularly uses pdnsd, or another dns cache system? I’ve tried a few others without satisfactory results as with pdnsd so any feedback would be interesting to hear.

pdnsd homepage
Arch wiki – pdnsd