DNS went haywire yesterday?

[bob at sinister.com (Bob Keyes)]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Rich Braun wrote:

> My nice new mail server's been running stable for months.  Yesterday my
> Squirrelmail config hit a major speed bump:  most queries to Apache (be it
> within Squirrelmail or otherwise, but I don't use my web server for much of
> anything but mail) don't respond until about 20 or 30 seconds later.
>
> I tried rebooting and restarting various apps.  The only thing which seemed to
> help is disabling HostnameLookup in the httpd.conf file.  But I can't seem to
> identify any other symptom, manual 'dig' queries work just fine.  And the
> problem occurred whether or not I point resolv.conf to Comcast's servers or to
> my own.
>
> It's a mystery to me--nothing changed on my system until I rebooted at 67
> days' uptime after the problem started to appear--and I'm just checking to see
> if anyone else has noticed a problem with Apache 1.3.27 servers suddenly
> acting up starting  24 hours ago.

How do other applications besides apache and dig work? telnet or ssh for
instance?

You should check your /etc/nsswitch.conf file. This determines the order
in which methods of resolving names are used. If you have NIS in there
then that could be a problem.