bug#20816: Excessive negative cache time for DNS lookups

["Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 10:43 PM, Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> wrote:
> On my GuixSD system, DNS lookup failures (due to lack of network) are
> cached for at least 4 minutes, and possibly much longer (I've not had
> the patience to wait until it expires).
>
> Even after restarting nscd, the negative cache entry persists for about
> another 20 seconds.
>
> I run into this problem quite frequently after waking my system up from
> suspend-to-ram.  It typically takes several seconds for wicd to
> establish a network connection, and if I make the mistake of triggering
> a name lookup of my server (world.peace.net), then I must do the
> following:
>
> (1) deco restart nscd
> (2) wait about 20 seconds
>
> Looking at %nscd-default-caches in (gnu services base), I see that the
> intent is to cache host lookup failures for 20 seconds, and service
> lookup failures for an hour.  The fact that the negative cache entry
> persists for 20 seconds after restarting nscd would seem to indicate
> that nscd considers this to be a host lookup.  So perhaps this is a bug
> in nscd.
>
> Is anyone else able to reproduce this problem?

Yes, I had this exact same issue on Friday after having wireless
network connectivity problems.

- Dave