Android: Flush DNS

Question

We recently released an android application that pulls information from an external server. Last week we moved from shared hosting to a dedicated server, that went smoothly up until we started getting complaints that users were getting server not found errors. We checked on our android-based phones (Droid) and everything worked fine. The vast majority of users are fine, there seems to be a small percentage of t-mobile users running android o/s 1.5 (g1, mytouch 3g) that seem to be having trouble. We believe these are all previous users of the application.

Anyway, we've been trying to find a fix (similar to ipconfig /flushdns) but have been unable to do so. Has anyone had experience with something similar to this? Thanks.

Answer 1

Root it and run /etc/init.d/nscd restart? See also, this LinuxQuestions thread.

That assumes android is running nscd, otherwise it could be caching at T-Mobile's end as well.

Answer 2

You have a few options:

• Release an update for your app that uses a different hostname that isn't in anyone's cache.
• Same thing, but using the IP address of your server
• Have your users go into settings -> applications -> Network Location -> Clear data.

You may want to check that last step because i don't know for a fact that this is the appropriate service. I can't really test that right now. Good luck!