Printing Delay *SOLVED* -- Interesting one (hint, hint -- add to KB)

So, I re-did my network, re-arranging items, and pulling my dns and dhcp servers over to a local machine, so I could have custom dns. And, I moved the ip address of my printer.

Then suddenly, it was taking 2-5 minutes for a printout to start. I called apple -- no help. Then I sniffed the connection: The mac was sending out weird dns queries. I searched for them, and discovered that they were related to Service Discovery (Bonjour). So, I added some SD items to my DNS -- then I started getting more dns . . and, then I noticed the real clue -- a dns request returned with server error. I thought about it, and I tested:

dig -x 172.16.84.0

It took forever before timing out! My new DNS server was sending internal network queries out to the world, which was ignoring them.

So, I added two zones, 172.16.84 and 192.168.191 (the two addresses the mac was quering), and left the zone files empty. Viola! Instant printouts again.

So, in a nutshell -- Bonjour will behave very slowly if you allow your dns server to forward internal addresses to the real world.

Let me know if you know a better way to fix this, rather than setting up bogus empty zones.

-Dave