Re: apt-get connect takes forever, download instantaneous

[Seth Delackner <seth@jtan.com>]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 12:06:44AM +0000, Shri Shrikumar wrote:
> Just a thought,
> 
> try ping www.debian.org. if it takes a while to resolve the ip address,
> then the problem is something to do with the dns server (yours /
> external)
> 
> you could also try dig www.debian.org and see how long that takes.

Someone on the NYLUG list helped me narrow this down to DNS.  If I
change my sources.list to have ftp://<ip address>/... then there is
no connection delay.

However, if, by hand, I time nslookup <site name>, then it resolves
instantly, and if I manually ftp <site name>, that also connects
instantly.  So what is so special about apt that it can't also?

Here's my apt.conf in case it is screwing me up.  The passive ftp line
I added to try to fix this delay, but it didn't do anything because
of course, the delay was DNS related.  Disregard the http
proxy specified, as all my sources are ftp://. Everything else is
straight from the default installation (stable) config.

        Acquire::ftp::passive "true";
        Acquire::http::Proxy "http://seth:3128/";;
        // Pre-configure all packages before they are installed.
        // (Automatically added by debconf.)
        DPkg::Pre-Install-Pkgs {"/usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure --apt";};