On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 10:27:12 -0600, Michael Parson <mparson@bl.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 08:47:22AM +0530, arnuld wrote:
> >> I had also the same problem when installing NetBSD. Pings took too
> >> long to respond and sometimes they worked and others didn't. As I
> >> think you've been told already, this is a DNS resolution timeout or
> >> something related.
> >>
> >> All of this problems where gone for me when I run named, the daemon
> >> for name-resolution.
> >>
> >> /usr/sbin/named
> >

This wasn't a name server problem per se.  It was an external connectivity
problem for everything, including the name server.  But that caused things
like ping to appear to be very slow, because it was waiting for the DNS
query to time out.  Get connectivity working first; after that, see if you
need your own server.

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb