Diving into the depths of Linux network configuration

Send help if I don't emerge in a few days.

Here's the situation: My internet connectivity sucks. It's fast (enough) when it works, but connections, e.g. opening a new web page frequently "hang": taking somewhere between very long to forever to conclude. A reload and retry will frequently work instantly.

First clue was that the issue might be DNS related. Consulting the great Google yielded this at serverfault. One of the suggestions to diagnose problems with reverse DNS lookups is to check the speed difference between netstat -a and netstat -an, the idea being that -n doesn't require reverse DNS, since it just uses numeric addresses. So here goes:

> time netstat -an

...

real 0m0.039s

user 0m0.010s

sys 0m0.010s

> time netstat -a

...

real 0m37.941s

user 0m0.000s

sys 0m0.020s

Well, there's your problem.

Okay, so my reverse DNS records are probably screwed up. Problem is, I don't really know what that means, or what to do about it. Is this my ISP's fault? (I'm prepared to believe that, since it's Qwest, after all.)

Stay tuned, for more posts about me trying to get a clue.