LendKey

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

WIFI slowness of my Macbook Pro

My Macbook Pro (2007 edition)'s WIFI turned to be very slow recently. Speed test (http://www.speedtest.net) sometime report only 10K download while I have 15M Comcast broadband.
I struggled many days and tried different ways I could imagine, even bough a new router, problem still unresolved.

Today, I tried to check /var/log/system.log and found lots of error messages like:

Feb 9 01:10:06 li-mac-2 mDNSResponder[22]: AppendDNSNameString: Illegal empty label in name "."
Feb 9 01:10:06 li-mac-2 mDNSResponder[22]: RegisterSplitDNS: bad domain .


Then I Googled the keywords:mDNSResponder[22]: RegisterSplitDNS: bad domain . and found a hint at:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6911574


Followed suggestion from the site, I finally managed to resolve my issue. Since the DNS error msg is gone, my MacBook Pro could do 14Mbps on wifi.

Here's summary of what I did:
1. run scutil --dns and saw something like:

DNS configuration

resolver #1
nameserver[0] : 192.168.0.1
order : 200000

resolver #2
domain : .
options : pdns
timeout : 5
order : 150000

resolver #3
domain : local
options : mdns
timeout : 2
order : 300000
...


2. Open Keychain Access
3. Click on System at left side
4. Find and delete item named DNS Key
5. Reboot
6. Problem resolved!

4 comments:

Erica said...

Break it down for a mactard, please?

I just purchased my first mac... a mac book pro. I'm a graphic designer and learned on a mac and was very excited to buy one, but I've never had to deal with wifi on a mac before because I used the computers at school that were already hooked up to the network.

I'm a designer - not a programmer. I know absolutely nothing about DNS whatevers for pc or mac. I know how to make graphics and surf the internet and that's about the extent of my computer skills.

My wifi worked at panera, but that's it. Not at my favorite coffee shop and not at my apartment where I stole wifi from the neighbors on my pc (that actually belongs to my former employers). So what is a starving artist with her first mac supposed to do about connecting to the internet for free now?

Thanks soooooo much for any help you can provide. I found this link to your blog on a random mac discussion board, btw.

Carl said...

Interestingly, I have two system keychains, but no DNS entry.

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