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Some IOError response tests in my unit test suite suddenly started failing. Have passed several times daily for months, only started failing today - they had a time out of 2 seconds. Chasing this up I found that it was taking over 30 seconds for the IOError to be produced.

We're accessing the web (BT broadband DSL) via a wireless router (Wire2).

Have found out the following:

Traceroute from mac to a nonsense host takes over 30 seconds to respond with 'unknown host'. (Confirmed on 3 machines - All macs running 10.6.2 or 10.6.3)

Traceroute direct from the router's web utility (to nonsense host) returns 'unknown host' in less than a second.

Reboots - including 10 minutes of downtime for everything in the household - have made no difference.

  • The problem only started in the last 24 hours.
  • Pinging of live servers is normal.
  • Web browsing etc is normal.

The problem is specifically only occurring when a host that doesn't exist is looked up.

Anyone got any clues as to why the communication of 'unknown host' out to the network would take a further 30 seconds?

Thanks

+1  A: 

Genius friend suggested I change the DNS Server settings in Network settings to some alternative ones provided by my ISP.

Works a charm.

Stray