[clug] DNS timeout causing me grief

[Tony and Robyn Lewis]

Accessing www.anz.com and loading the homepage takes my computer about
two minutes.  I finally got frustrated enough to look into it.  Ethereal
tells me that my system first does an 'AAAA' (this is IPv6, right?)
query for www.anz.com, before eventually moving on to querying an 'A'
(IPv4?) record, and progressing at relative lightspeed.

The problem is that ANZ's nameservers don't seem to respond to an 'AAAA'
record, and we have timeout, which takes maybe 15s.  Do this a couple of
times and things are a real pain.

I verified it wasn't just my system or ISP - dnsstuff.com's query showed
similar timeouts.  I also did queries of other domains, such as
www.slashdot.org.  A very quick response, as you'd expect.

However, I pulled up the homepage from work, and it was very fast
(WinNT-based, big public sector corporate network)

So where do I go from here?  Can I tell DNS on the system generally to
not bother with IPv6?  Or should my ISP cache a negative response?  Or
should I rouse on ANZ?

I did actually submit an email to ANZ, and to their credit they rang me
today.  I spoke to a semi-DNS-literate person, and as soon as he found
out that I wasn't having the same problem at work, mention 'proxies' and
'wasn't able to help me further'.

Tony