Checking internet connection without a winbox

[Dotan Cohen]

I concatenate several of Les's emails in this message:

> There is a checkbox in the network setup that controls whether
> you use the dhcp-supplied DNS servers or not, but others have
> mentioned a bug in it.

How do I launch that from the command line? I seem to have erased to
many things in cleaning up the Kmenu!

> Did you try the 'dig' command to
> test each of the addresses?  If they work but are slow,
> you could improve things by installing the caching-nameserver
> package.

I will install the package anyway, but how do you define slow? 20 ms? 80 ms?

> Are you 'behind' a university controlled network or directly
> on the internet?  If someone else controls the network branch
> there is some chance that you are behind a transparent proxy
> that intercepts port 80 and tries to resolve requests from
> a cache - and perhaps logs and filters what you are doing.  If
> this is overloaded or mismanaged it can slow things down.

I'm on a commercial ISP, not the university. So far as I know, I'm
right there on the net. I don't think that there are any ports being
blocked, and I don't know of any filtering/logging going on. I'll ask.
I should know about this if it is happening.

Dotan Cohen
http://simplesniff.com