Two Ubuntu Dapper Tweaks

I do love Gentoo, often more than is seemly, but sometimes I don’t want to spend half a day or so compiling everything. So, I installed Dapper on my new box at work. Everything looked great, and the Gnome desktop is certainly nice if a bit of a memory hog compared to XFCE…

… but after a while I was going crazy, because anything that dealt with the net seems to be so incredibly slow. Everything from browsing to doing apt-get to wgets took forever and a day. I would, literally, right click/open a bunch of search results in google, go and make coffee, and come back… and they still wouldn’t have all loaded.

The problem? Dapper comes configured out of the box with ipv6 enabled… and on some configurations (such as the one at work), this caused an inordinate amount of delay everytime it tried to resolve something. The solution? Go to the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add:

blacklist ipv6

Voila! Everything is suddenly fast.

Special Bonus Tweak

At work, the DHCP-declared nameserver is an original Pentium that is also running timeshare FORTRAN programs for a couple of local high schools — or, at least, that’s what it feels like. So, no problem, just change resolv.conf to a local machine that was doing double duty as a name server.

Unfortunately, the resolv.conf file gets overwritten if the dhclient stuff thinks that your nameserver isn’t correctly set up. Shades of Microsoft Windows. As a result, every time I booted the resolv.conf would get trashed. The fix?

sudo chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

It’s a nuclear bomb approach to a simple problem, but that’ll teach the OS to overwrite my carefully handcrafted resolv.conf!

Discussion

Comments are moderated whenever I remember that I have a blog.