[dns-wg] Looking for a tool to find the fastest DNS server

At 2:37 PM +0200 2003/08/04, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

>  Suggestions if someone wants to improve it:
>
>  1) Parallelize requests (the tool can take a long time if some servers
>  are slow).

	Speaking as the current maintainer of `doc`, parallelizing shell 
code is a bitch.  Moreover, if you were going to do that, you should 
really do a statistically useful number of queries for each target, 
so that you have a more reasonable conclusion -- As of time T, server 
X is Y% faster than the second-fastest server Z, with a minimum 
response time of M1, an average response time of A, a maximum 
response time of M2, and a sample standard deviation of S.

	This is the sort of thing I tried to do in my root/gTLD/ccTLD 
survey for my presentation at RIPE44.  I still need to make all those 
tools publicly available, as promised.  If you want them, 
periodically bug me about it and I'll try to remember to put them up.

>  2) Better handling of errors instead of printing:
>
>  dig: Couldn't find server 'Truncated,': Name or service not known
>  dig: Couldn't find server 'retrying': Name or service not known
>  dig: Couldn't find server 'TCP': Name or service not known
>  dig: Couldn't find server 'mode.': Name or service not known
>  dig: Couldn't find server ';;': Name or service not known

	Yup.  I have that problem with `doc`, too.  I keep saying that 
I'm going to import all this functionality into `dnswalk` and get rid 
of `doc`, but I still haven't found time to do it.  Maybe one of 
these days.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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