Rick,
Thanks - yes, that will help, though I don't think I'll get close enough
to the problem to decide if it's ip communications or a windows dns
server issue. (I could do other connectivity tests to the dns servers,
same result)
I came across these options when working with a really nasty performance
problem, involving AIX dns clients, resolving names on win2k3 servers.
At the time, I was being pushed to populate hosts files on dozens of
unix hosts, rather than get to the bottom of what was going on.
Eventually, we found that the AIX version in use would attempt ipv6
style dns client behaviour several times, before failing back to ipv4
behaviour. At the time, IBM gave us no support what so ever - just
blamed microsoft. As usual, the way to solve a vendor war is, get to the
root of the problem.
I'm pretty clueless on where gethostbyname lives in the os. My guess
would be, a shared library that many programs link against, rather than
part of the kernel.. This was the kind of info I was looking for.
Thanks for everybody's input so far.
b
Ben Burke wrote:
Yes, I know about dig. But the problem I'm having appears to be failure
of dns server to respond, or a communications problem with dns server(s)
I admittedly haven't delved deep into the dig man page, but a suggestion
would be to add a suitable dig incantation to your cron job just before
requiring DNS services, just to see what is happening in detail at the
time.
At least you'd have a log written to stdout that you can examine for
anomalies
when something awry happens with "that server".
cheers
rickw
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