Hi all

Living in extreme remote places (SE Asia) required me 10+ years ago to have my own DNS in my laptop ( NO forwarder !!) with openSuSE this is no problem and all works fine.

Since a few weeks my mobile provider apparently messed up his DNS and I cant surf the web anymore with my N900. (IP based surfing YES, name resolving based surfing NO). No more resolving available these days.

Hence I started to search (Google site:maemo.org) for any possible solution with any apps from maemo.org to have a fully working DNS in my N900.
http://maemo.org/packages/view/bind9/
has only results for maemo3/2/1

How to proceed to install a full package bind9 on maemo5 /N900 ??
Has anyone done it successfully and how ?
Any regular Debian package suitable for that purpose on N900 and if yes - any help on how exactly to proceed?

Any help appreciated

This might be a silly question as maybe I did not understand corectly your problem but wouldn't it be easier to use a public DNS service like Google's public DNS 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4?

This is a valid question and possible temporary emergency solution - to use ANY, incl G public DNS.
However this would be a temporary patch of an error in system and no final clean solution. I successfully use my own built-in bind DNS since 10+ years to be fully self-dependent.
Any other DNS substitute would substantially slow down resolving by several hundred ms per query.
;; Query time: 752 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
for every query!!

While a built in DNS may at worst have a similar query time for the first query on a domain name and for all subsequent queries usually 1ms!

Since we do have Debian bind9 packages and maemo5/N900 is potentially Debian compatible, I really was wondering how to cleanly solve the problem by adding bind9. Unfortunately I have zero Debian experience ( since 12+ yrs happy SuSE/openSuSE user).

Uhh, maemo1/2/3 is the version number of the package, it's for Maemo 5/Fremantle.
apt-get install bind9 should be enough if you have extras-devel enabled

Isn't bind a bit of an overkill? Plenty of lightweight (and probably more secure) dns resolvers around. I maradns on my desktops, it's quick and easy to setup - but for N900 you would probably have to compile it yourself.

Note that Maemo does come with a caching (though not recursive) DNS daemon by default (dnsmasq). Using a specific upstream server rather than the one provided by DHCP/IPCP is just a configuration matter.