Sonic.net

Caches cleared; no improvement.

Now starting to see the same failure message for a variety of destination pages in addition to Google.

This maybe related, from comp.risks:?

Re: Very old news. A Chrome feature is creating enormous load on global root DNS servers (RISKS-32.24)
“John Levine” <johnl@iecc.com>
25 Aug 2020 22:51:29 -0400

>A Chrome feature is creating enormous load on global root DNS servers

Someone hasn't been paying attention. The ICANN Name Collision report written seven years ago in 2013 said the exact same thing:

https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/f ... g13-en.pdf

See section 5.4.3 on page 48. At that point the Chrome random names were 46% of all root server traffic (see table 12 on the previous page.)

ankh,

FWIW: Running Firefox on my Late 2009 iMac, over Sonic fiber, I don’t see any problems connecting to https://www.google.com.
Specifically:

• My OS is High Sierra (10.13.6)
• I’m running Firefox 80.0.1, 64 bit (latest release)
• Sonic fiber is routed through the Berkeley CO
• My DNS is Sonic default (208.201.224.11 Primary / 208.201.224.33 Secondary)
• My RG/router is an Apple AirPort Extreme, connected to the ONT, running Apple’s latest firmware release
• My Firefox privacy settings are “Standard,” but changing them to “Strict” doesn’t seem to affect behavior
• All my other Firefox settings are pretty much plain vanilla

Except fo your rent-a-router, our setups seems very similar, but their behaviors differ. Let me know if you’d like me to check or toggle any settings, and I’ll let you know what I see.

By the way, don’t be too quick to disparage ten-year-old iMacs. I maxed out my RAM and installed a terabyte SSD, and that thing rocks! I expect to replace it in the next couple of years, mostly because of dwindling OS support, but I’m in no hurry.

Regards,
Chris

Hm, similar setups -- but my DNS has been set to 192.168.42.1, which I assume is the new rent-a-router. That's for both Ethernet and WiFi.

I'll try changing both of them back to the old 208.201.224.11, and ~33, which I recall was used before the upgrade to fiber.

Thanks for the detailed comparison!

To be clear, my router points to the Sonic DNS server, and my iMac points to the router.

Regardless, changing the setting on your Mac to point directly to the Sonic DNS server may be a useful test, if it turns out your rent-a-router is part of the issue.

So far, haven't had any problem since I changed the Mac settings to point to the old Sonic DNSes.

I've never touched the rent-a-router settings, assuming Sonic takes care of managing that.

Excellent. If it keeps behaving, you can call the problem solved, even if the root cause remains unidentified.

Problem is back, and I'm unable to open multiple sites.
Also getting "slow website" warnings from Firefox.

Any relation to this, maybe?
https://blog.apnic.net/2020/08/21/chrom ... s-traffic/

Have you turned off DoH (DNS over HTTPS) in Firefox?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fi ... over-https

DNS over HTTPS was turned on, I assusme by default, using Cloudflare.

I turned it off. Thanks for the suggestion. Let's see ....