Re: NetworkManager forcing nscd startup

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 01:18 +0100, Ziga Mahkovec wrote:
> On my Fedora system, NetworkManager keeps starting the name cache daemon
> (nscd), even though it's stopped and is not configured to run.  I
> attached a fix for the backend code.

This is by design.  There is no way to notify user-space applications
that /etc/resolv.conf has changed unless you restart nscd.  Otherwise,
Mozilla for instance will sit there for 20s waiting for DNS to time out.
I proposed changes to libc (where the DNS resolver lives) and was shot
down because stat()-ing /etc/resolv.conf every so often was not
something the maintainer wanted to do.

So, unless you want long pauses in user applications, we have to use
nscd.  The other option is to use a caching nameserver on the client,
and point local DNS resolution to that caching nameserver, since the
local nameserver _can_ stat /etc/resolv.conf for changes without the
libc guys getting ornery.

Dan