Terminal Problem

[Ferghal]

Im currently trying to connect my xbox to my macbook for wireless, following instructions on a site.

The site asks me to type dig into Terminal for DNS information, but none appears. I know I can simply get it by Going to "About Mac" and Networking, but in the end my plan doesnt work. So I think it could be something to do with the dig part,

so the question is, why isnt the information coming up??

Cheers

 

[djdawson]

What dig command are you using, and happens when you try it? That'd help us figure out what might be going on.

 

[Ferghal]

What dig command are you using, and happens when you try it? That'd help us figure out what might be going on.

as in I type dig into terminal, press enter and I get the following:

; <<>> DiG 9.2.2 <<>>
;; global options: printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

 

[superbovine]

get your dns server info from network in the prefences pane.

 

[djdawson]

My guess is your Mac isn't getting any DNS server information at all from your home router, so dig doesn't know where to send DNS queries. Many home routers to "proxy DNS" and don't hand out DNS server information, even though the ISP is providing it. In this case the DHCP clients (e.g. your Mac) sends DNS requests to the local broadcast address, which the router sees and then forwards on to the ISP DNS servers. To fix this you can enter the IP address(es) of your ISP DNS servers in your Networking preferences, but first you have to find out what they are. Sometimes you can get this information from your ISP's support pages (look in the FAQ areas), but you can also probably get these addresses by going to the web interface of your router and looking at the Status screen. That will usually list the IP addresses that the router got from the ISP.

HTH - Good luck!

 

[mkrishnan]

djdawson, based on that, is it also possible to just set the DNS to be the router's intranet IP?

 

[Ferghal]

thanks a million dj, that solved my problem!

 

[djdawson]

djdawson, based on that, is it also possible to just set the DNS to be the router's intranet IP?

I think that will work, but I'm not sure what the advantage would be. In my experience home routers aren't very good at doing this DNS stuff. For example, I have a bunch of bookmarks (20) I visit regularly in a folder in my Safari bookmark bar that I access by selecting the "Open in Tabs" option at the bottom of the list that pops up when I click on the folder. I noticed that some of the links wouldn't open, with an error that Safari couldn't find the server. If I reloaded the page it would work. My suspicion is that my home router at the time couldn't deal with the task of forwarding several DNS requests all at once. When I statically configure DNS servers in my Network Preferences they work very reliably and, I think, a bit faster. I've seen this issue with Netgear and TrendNet routers, but it wouldn't surprise me if other similar devices did the same thing.

 

[mkrishnan]

I think that effect actually has to do with the way Safari handles timeouts, and not DNS resolution... but you could be right.

I was mostly thinking that it was very simple to go for the router, and if there was proxying, the effect would be fairly similar....