Slow Web Browsing in Ubuntu

A couple of years ago I bought a Belkin wireless router. No big surprises there. My main PC connected to it via a network cable, my kid's PC using wireless.

In Windows it works great. In Linux it didn't. There was a noticable delay (around four seconds) from entering a web address to the page starting to load. Every time.

In the end I switched to a different router which nicely avoided the problem, and the old router took up it's new position as an "emergency backup."

Now the new router has finally failed, and so I've switched back to the "old" one, and yes, it is still slow to browse in Ubuntu. The funny thing is that once the page starts loading it loads quickly, but there is that long delay before it starts.

So now I'm stuck with it, and with the benefit of a couple of years more experience under my belt it is time to find out what's going wrong.

Let's turn to our good friend dig and see whats going on:

dig www.google.com

This gives the following response:

;; reply from unexpected source: 8.8.8.8#53, expected 192.168.1.1#53

; <<>> DiG 9.7.3 <<>> www.google.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 59114
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.google.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com. 3 IN CNAME www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com. 3 IN A 209.85.229.99
www.l.google.com. 3 IN A 209.85.229.103
www.l.google.com. 3 IN A 209.85.229.104
www.l.google.com. 3 IN A 209.85.229.147
www.l.google.com. 3 IN A 209.85.229.105

;; Query time: 36 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Sat Feb 11 17:45:21 2012
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 132

The first line gives a very good clue as to what the problem may be.

reply from unexpected source: 8.8.8.8#53, expected 192.168.1.1#53

The unexpected source is what I would have thought was my primary DNS server (and indeed the router's configuration confirms this, with 8.8.4.4. as the secondary). The "expected" IP address is the router itself. This explains the slow browsing - as there there will be a delay while the DNS request is made to the router (which doesn't respond) before moving on to the true DNS server (which does).

Running the connection information tool confirms this. The router is being set up as the primary DNS server, with 8.8.8.8 as the secondary and 8.8.4.4 as tertiary.

The fix? I've set up a manual IP address for the desktop, which is just out of the router's DHCP scope, and manually specifies the correct DNS entries (but remembering to set the router as the gateway). Browsing is now just as fast on Ubuntu as it is on Windows.

Sorted!

Vista Probs - Slow Internet Speed

I had a phone call from my younger sister today - her fiance's PC was running strangely. Sometimes the internet was fine, other times it ground to a halt. They'd checked for spyware and viruses - but couldn't find anything wrong.

Whilst logged in as an administrator open a command prompt (or use the "run as" option on the command prompt shortcut).

Type the following command:

netsh interface tcp show global

This should return a fair bit of information, but the line we are interested in is the one that starts:

Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level

If this shows anything other than "disabled" then you can try entering this:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

This should return "OK".

At this point we tried browsing the web - and lo-and-behold it was browsing at a more normal (ie fast) speed.

If you want to set it back to the way it was, you can try this:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=automatic

A quick fix, but one that is worth remembering.

Windows 2000 shares: "You were not connected because a duplicate name exists on the network"

One of our elderly Windows 2000 servers had a strange problem. Even though WINS and DNS were set up correctly for the machine, trying to connect to the shares on it only worked if you connected directly to its IP address, for example:

\\127.0.0.1\randomshare

If you tried to connect directly to its name (like so):

\\ourserver\randomshare

you get the message "You were not connected because a duplicate name exists on the network. Go to System in Control Panel to change the computer name and try again." From some PCs you could browse to

\\ourserver\

but you couldn't see any shares.

The solution in this case was to patch the registry for the server in the following section:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters

Create a new REG_DWORD key "DisableStrictNameChecking" and set its value to "1", then reboot.

Once the server is back up and running you should be able to browse to the shares without the error.

See http://support.microsoft.com/?id=281308 for more detail.

Things to do on your day off #1 - Reconfigure Your Network

Around this time last year I invested in a cheap-and-cheerful Dynamode BR-6004 Wireless Router and a LinkSys wireless PCI network card. This was to allow my children to access the internet from their bedroom without me having to run cables through the house.

The downside to this was the built-in four port hub. For some reason there was a noticeable delay when accessing the internet when directly wired in to the hub. This meant that for browsing the web the my kids PC felt faster than the directly wired one.

I'd never found a way around this, but as the actual download speeds were OK it was something I was willing to put up with.

There were some other issues with the router. One of them was that you had to run Internet Explorer in order to configure the modem. FireFox or Konqueror just wouldn't work correctly with it.

None of this was reason enough to ditch it so I've stuck with it, albeit slightly annoyed that the kids had a better browsing experience than I did, and I was paying for the damn thing!

Last week however a colleague gave me a second hand SiteCom WL-025 Wireless Router that he no longer wanted. Although on paper it should be a worse router than the Dynamode one, in practice it works a damn site better. The network delay has gone, network encryption works better (even if it supports less protocols), the web configuration works with Firefox, and the network connection speed appears faster too.