Flushing Stale DNS in Unix

6 February 2007 6 Comments

In case anyone else needs this information, I’ve just figured out that

1	ipconfig /flushdns

that we use in the Windows world translates to

1	lookupd -flushcache

in ~~Unix/Linux/~~Mac OS X/BSD.

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Tags: dns, Mac, shell, terminal

Michael Hampton 6 February 2007 at 5:24 pm #

It does?

I certainly don’t have any “lookupd” on any of my Linux boxes.

As far as I know, Linux (and most other Unix variants) doesn’t cache DNS lookups at all; however, individual applications might do so. Firefox is notorious for this.
Aaron Brazell 6 February 2007 at 5:26 pm #

Yeah and actually it’s on CentOS as well as OS X. I’ve used it quite a bit recently. Generally the times I need it come when I start hardcoding /etc/hosts to migrate blogs, etc. Happens in Firefox and Safari, so… yeah. :)
MJR/slef 7 February 2007 at 5:32 am #

So how does that differ from rndc flush?
Aaron Brazell 7 February 2007 at 11:13 am #

Not saying it is different. It’s just how I do it.
Michael Hampton 7 February 2007 at 12:21 pm #

rndc flush deals with the nameserver itself, not the workstations which use the nameserver.

In any case, I still haven’t even been able to FIND a lookupd on CentOS. What package is it in?

It certainly sounds like you’re doing absolutely nothing — or something quite different from Windows.
Aaron Brazell 7 February 2007 at 12:28 pm #

Michael, you’re right. My bad. I thought I had used it on our servers but I hadn’t and it’s not on Linux (will update entry). It’s a BSD sysutil (and thus on OS X).