In a previous post i explained how i run a server, etc. etc. Since i have absolutely nothing else to write about, i’m posting a part II of sorts for that post. This time its about the dns server i run. A few months ago i switched my internal network over to use my own locally hosted dns server. The following are the top queries its received from the internal hosts.

16527
 
time.apple.com


16188
 
www.google.com


4513
 
weather.wapp.wii.com


4235
 
ad.yieldmanager.com


2315
 
news.wapp.wii.com


1907
 
www.symantec.com


1852
 
ad.doubleclick.net


1612
 
105.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa


1347
 
cfh.wapp.wii.com


1320
 
202-177-19-148.kdd.net.hk.jessecole.org

Ok, we can see we have several very popular sites. The first is not quite what you’d expect, its time.apple.com. You don’t think about it but every computer and device you own likely keeps itself synchronized with a time server. Every time it goes to synchronize, it has to do a dns lookup. Actually this number is a tad distorted by the fact that my router decided it should update its time 10 or 11 times a day, (thank you Dlink). I actually got sick of it a made it use the ip address for time.apple.com instead of the hostname so hopefully that number won’t go up so much.

The next most popular query is for www.google.com. No surprise there. Every time you type in the website or use the search bar in your browser and possibly even just visiting certain websites will cause a query to be performed.

The most interesting out of all these though is the fact that, in my top 10 queries, 2 of them (ad.yieldmanager.com and ad.doubleclick.com) are well known ad servers. What a waste of time and bandwidth that is. In the future, i may start blocking queries to well known ad sites just to avoid giving them stats on us.