upr00ted

This issue seems to have cropped up in Panther (10.3.5 or 10.3.6) Macworld covered it in their September 2004 issue, but their fix didn’t seem to help me. It’s been posted on numerous bulletin boards and people seem to be of the impression that 10.3.6 fixed the problem for them.

The Codepoet found that turning off IPv6 worked for himself. This had no effect for me. It seems that the general consensus is either that the new handling of IPv6 records by DNS servers or slow ping times to DNS servers was to blame for this new bug.

The Mac Fix it article above eluded to my final solution. If the problem had to do with other people’s DNS servers, why not run one locally. I went into /etc/hostconfig and changed the DNSSERVER line to read: DNSSERVER=-YES- (open with sudo). Problem fixed. This seems to have worked on both my G5 and my girlfriend’s iBook. Finally for good measure I added 0 0 1 * * root /usr/bin/curl ftp://ftp.rs.internic.net/domain/named.root > /var/named/named.ca to /etc/crontab so that the root server list will get updated once a month. Thanks to the O’rielly Mac Dev Center for a bit of a BIND Tutorial.

If anyone knows a reason why it might be bad to run BIND on a laptop I’d love to hear it. That was my only hesitation.