[Fink-beginners] CURL / DNS problem in Leopard (was 'Fink bootstrap fails in Leopard')

[Chris J. <ch...@bu...>]

In reply to this earlier message, I believe there is a DNS-related
issue which is effecting a number of programs. The two I have found
are curl and adium's MSN support.

The easiest way to diagnose this problem is to run 'time curl
http://google.com' (or other favourite website. I find I always get an
answer of almost exactly:

real	1m0.938s
user	0m0.006s
sys	0m0.005s

While at home. Other programs (such as ping) work fine, and if I run
curl with google's IP address it works as expected. At work, I also
find my laptop works fine.

This problem has been mentioned in a couple of places, for example:

http://boards.ign.com/mac_general_board/b5146/152983353/p1/

For Adium the suggested fix has been to put the MSN servers directly
into /etc/hosts. I have found this has fixed the problem. Similarly,
putting google.com directly into /etc/hosts makes curl work properly.
However, this is obviously not a useful long-term solution for fink,
as it gets files from so many sites.

Some people has advised manually adding new DNS servers to your list,
or editing the configuration of your modem/router to not do it's own
internal DNS caching. I have not had any success with either of these
options as of yet.

This seems to be a problem that can be blamed on Apple, so I'm hoping
they will fix it soonish.