socket setdefaulttimeout

[John Machin]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

> 
> 	I've got the opposite problem -- I'm on a dial-up (well, for a few
> more weeks -- until the DSL gear arrives). For some reason DNS lookups
> seem to be low priority and, if I'm downloading messages in Agent (from
> three servers yet) and email (Eudora), Firefox often comes back with a
> "host not found"; enter the same URL/bookmark again, and it finds the
> page. It seems my system times out DNS requests when 1) I have a lot of
> traffic on the dial-up connection, 2) the request may need to be
> traversed (not cached on Earthlink)

Dragging the thread off-topic a little:

I was having a similar DNS problem (host not found, try again 
immediately, 2nd try successful) but even in a no-other-load situation, 
and with this set of gear:

* ADSL with Netgear DG834G v2 "wireless ADSL firewall router"
* both hardwired and wireless LAN connection to router
* Firefox, Thunderbird [normally]
* IE6, Outlook Express [just to test if it was a Mozilla problem]
* Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows 2000 SP4

The problem stopped after I upgraded the router firmware from version 
1.something to 2.something, but this may be yet another instance of the 
"waved a dead chicken at the volcano" syndrome :-)