DNS "stalls" on Solaris2.6/BIND8

[Andrew Sinclair]

Andrew Sinclair wrote:
> 
> Hi All
> 
> I'm experiencing an intermittent fault on a new name server I'm setting
> up under Solaris.


(snip)

Many Thanks to those esp Mark Andrews from ISC and the Sun team for
their answers. The real problem (in addition to the one Mark spotted)
appears to be a problem between BIND 8x and the Sun nscd. 

If you have /etc/nsswitch.conf set to "hosts:	file dns" it should use
/etc/hosts first then fall back onto the DNS server as specified in
/etc/resolv.conf

Name Services Cache Daemon (nscd(1M)) interposes itself and does name
services lookups (and caches them).

Sun (thanks William P. Malloy!) says ->

>  People who
> want to prevent this uncomment the line "enable-cache hosts no"
> in the /etc/nscd.conf file to turn off hosts caching if they are
> using DNS for all their hosts lookups.

But to be on the safe side I have disabled the Daemon altogether and
gone to just "hosts:	dns" in /etc/nsswitch.conf and presto, problem
gone. 

This did not appear to be a problem for BIND4 x

Thanks again for the assistance :)


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Andrew Sinclair                 Ph  (07) 4033 2311
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Internet North                  email: andrew at internetnorth.com.au
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