Re: broken dnsservers

Andy Farkas wrote:

> I've fiddled around a bit, and have discovered that the problem
> is related to NIS!?!! I get this now in the cache.log:
>
> yp_match: clnt_call: RPC: Timed out

Don't use NIS for host lookups if you have a system capable of DNS. Most
systems uses /etc/nsswitch.conf or a similar file to define the search
order for different kinds of lookups. Most systems have a default search
order of files nis dns (or nis dns files) to operate without change in
most environments, but this is a far from optimal setup.

This is not direcly related to the -b NIS option. Squid should not even
bother to ask the NIS server in the first place, but turing -b off is a
good thing to do since almost no systems except SunOS 4.X needs it
(SunOS 4.x can only use files or NIS and relies on the NIS server to
resolve DNS names). Since most NIS server implementations is
single-threaded and blocks while resolving a DNS query it is not a good
idea to have Squid using NIS to resolve DNS names, and having it to
always first ask NIS (which returns false) and then ask DNS is only
waste of resources (and response time)

---
Henrik Nordström
Sparetime Squid Hacker