🚀 go-pugleaf

James Murray wrote:
> 
> I know there may be a better forum to ask this question, but I expect
> someone here may be able to give a sensible answer.
> 
> One Solaris (2.7) machine I run has a Solaris ppp connection to Demon,
> it is dynamic and works pretty much ok. (Not as good as a free version
> that I used to use under SunOs though and not as good as on the 2.6 machine)
> 
> I've got named working, having moved the ppp/named/sendmail setup over
> from a Solaris 2.6 machine. I also run webroute as an http proxy server
> for the Windows machines on the LAN - Solaris doesn't seem to support
> IP masquerading like Linux does.
> All seems ok, except at times when the link is up and down like a yo-yo.
> I've traced this to named and turned the debug up to see what it is doing.
> It seems to keep querying websites that were looked up earlier. This
> persists even if I kill off the webroute. A 127.0.0.1:xxx -> 127.0.0.1:yyy
> connection is logged and a name lookup request for some ancient website.
> This also persists if I kill off named and restart.
> 
> I have a vague recollection of this happening before, but it didn't do it
> until I swapped machines. (I have even copied the named binary from the
> previous 2.6 machine as they use a far newer release of BIND which uses
> a totally different config file format. I also noticed that Solaris 2.7
> sendmail can't talk ESMTP! It got an error talking to post as it
> said LHLO instead of EHLO.)
> 
> Any help or pointers appreciated.
> 
> jsm

Look at nscd - name service cache daemon. I had this problem with it. It
is designed to interact with NIS+ and does not work well with DNS. By
default it caches usernames, groups and hosts. If you are using DNS you
don't need it to cache hosts, DNS does that. I spent most of a Sunday
sorting this, after it had spent the whole of Saturday night filling
BT's pockets at my expense.

Nscd seems - and I have no evidence for this but observation - to cache
every DNS name which has been looked up, and to "helpfully" keep its
idea of the value of the name current. So every so often it looks up
names which were previously asked for. What I saw was it doing a lookup
approximately every hour, on a machine with no-one logged on and no
applications running.

If this is the problem, you need to add the line:

        enable-cache            hosts           no 

to /etc/nscd.conf. On my system (2.7 Intel) it was in there commented
out after installation. Then restart nscd using /etc/init.d/nscd
stop/start.

I have no experience with Solaris releases prior to 2.7 so I don't know
whether they did this.

In my case Solaris is neither the router nor the nameserver, I use Linux
for all that. It's just a client on the network.

HTH, Ian