Nameserver failure in scripts FC5

I just developed a problem with FC 4 that did not fix when I upgraded
to FC 5. I did not change anything (yeah right) BUT yum was running
daily updates.

It appears that these two problems are related:

I have a script that calls lynx each hour to check the IP address of my
router (Roadrunner dynamic address). It started to fail each hour
claiming it could not find the WWW page. If I run the lynx command by
typing in a shell it works fine. If I execute the same script from the
command line, it fails because it can't resolve the domain name. (If I
hard wire the IP address in the hosts file it will work).

Yum started to complain that it could not find any mirrors. The URLs in
the .repo files are clean and can resolve if manually typed into a
browser. (If I hard wire the IP address in the hosts file it will
work).

Hardwiring is a cheat. I'd like to know what changed.

I think the change from BIND 9.2 to 9.3 has something to do with this
problem. I see a different syntax in the named.conf file to adding "IN"
when specifying a zone.

Any thoughts?

Dave

I checked the yum.log for the time period where things broke and
the following were changed/updated:

Mar 28 05:56:00 Updated: glibc-common.i386 2.3.6-3
Mar 28 05:56:27 Updated: glibc.i686 2.3.6-3
Mar 28 05:56:37 Updated: perl.i386 3:5.8.6-24
Mar 28 05:56:40 Updated: glibc-headers.i386 2.3.6-3
Mar 28 05:56:40 Updated: mtr.i386 2:0.71-0.FC4.1
Mar 28 05:56:40 Updated: mtr-gtk.i386 2:0.71-0.FC4.1
Mar 28 05:56:41 Updated: nscd.i386 2.3.6-3
Mar 28 05:56:43 Updated: glibc-utils.i386 2.3.6-3
Mar 28 05:56:49 Updated: squirrelmail.noarch 1.4.6-4.fc4
Mar 28 05:56:52 Updated: glibc-profile.i386 2.3.6-3
Mar 28 05:56:57 Updated: glibc-devel.i386 2.3.6-3

(E-Mail Removed) wrote:

> I just developed a problem with FC 4 that did not fix when I upgraded
> to FC 5. I did not change anything (yeah right) BUT yum was running
> daily updates.
>
> It appears that these two problems are related:
>
> I have a script that calls lynx each hour to check the IP address of my
> router (Roadrunner dynamic address). It started to fail each hour
> claiming it could not find the WWW page. If I run the lynx command by
> typing in a shell it works fine. If I execute the same script from the
> command line, it fails because it can't resolve the domain name. (If I
> hard wire the IP address in the hosts file it will work).
>
> Yum started to complain that it could not find any mirrors. The URLs in
> the .repo files are clean and can resolve if manually typed into a
> browser. (If I hard wire the IP address in the hosts file it will
> work).
>
> Hardwiring is a cheat. I'd like to know what changed.
>
> I think the change from BIND 9.2 to 9.3 has something to do with this
> problem. I see a different syntax in the named.conf file to adding "IN"
> when specifying a zone.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Dave

Maybe it would help to post the script
Mark

(E-Mail Removed) <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> I just developed a problem with FC 4 that did not fix when I upgraded
> to FC 5. I did not change anything (yeah right) BUT yum was running
> daily updates.

Check /etc/nsswitch.conf to make sure you don't have nis in the hosts line.
Make sure it looks like this

hosts: files dns

--
Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu | For every problem, there is a solution that
WPI Network Engineer | is simple, elegant, and wrong. - HL Mencken
GPG fingerprint = 6174 1257 129E 0D21 D8D4 E8A3 8E39 29E3 E2E8 8CEC

I think that might have been it. As part of the clean up after
migrating to FC5, I checked then applied nsswitch.conf.rpmnew and
things started to spontaneously work shortly thereafter. Unfortunately
I didn't make an RCS backup of the original file so I can't check the
exact status of NIS.

Thanks for your help.

Dave