tcp/ip

After watching Level1Techs' THE FORBIDDEN ROUTER II - DIAL-UP BY DAWN video, I wanted to do some DNS benchmarking on my local network.

Since I run Pi-hole locally, and rely on it for local DNS resolution, I wanted to have a baseline so I could compare performance over time.

In the video, Wendell mentioned the use of Gibson's Windows-only DNS Benchmark tool. But that's Windows-only. Or maybe Linux under WINE, but definitely not a native / open source tool that's easily used across different platforms.

I looked around and settled on bulldohzer—for now, at least—as it's easy to install anywhere Node.js runs. I have Node.js installed via Homebrew on my Mac, so I just ran:

npm install --location=global bulldohzer

Then I could run a benchmark against Google and my own local DNS resolver (Pi-Hole):

On the St. Louis Review website (case study here), which offers much of its content based on a subscription model (you must be a subscriber to access the 'premium' content), we wanted to allow those inside our network access to nodes that were marked 'subscribers-only', without having to log in to the website and maintain a user account. Here's how we did it:

1 - Modification of Custom Subscriber Access Code

Our site uses hook_nodeapi() to limit access to 'premium' or 'subscribers-only' content. We simply added in a check to see if users were coming from a certain IP address (the IP address for our corporate network):

Did you ever want to learn about the way networking and the Internet work, but only had about twelve minutes to do it? For 'networking noobs' and 'IT pros' alike, this video should bring a few good laughs, and a ton of nice information!