140232 - DNS: user accessible DNS server refresh button (Offline-Online)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, enhancement)

Description

[benc]

From bug 117628, but many other orphaned duplicates as well...

------- Additional Comment #32 From Brendan Eich 2002-04-25 16:32 -------

From darin's comments, do we need two bugs (which may already be on file -- if
anyone knows of them, please cite them here)?

1. The docshell layer should transparently retry after a DNS miss failure that
led to a successful Reset (res_init) call.

2. The work offline/online menu item should handle the local caching dns server
case darin mentions, and others like it.

---

The case for this feature is clear, based on two real-world situations users
will encounter. Some of this has been described in the various bugs that have
been filed, if you look carefully at what is being described or after some extra
digging.

1- User switches from network w/ shadow domain to internal domain, but the new
network does not firewall outbound DNS.

If we do not refresh, we continue to use the original DNS servers. There is no
error, there is no reset via res_init(). The problem here is that many people
offer subsets, or extranet versions of their domain (hence, it's a "shadow" of
the real domain) to the public network, but internally use the same domain for
many more hosts. 

In this case, the user, despite the fact they are "in" the internal network,
will still have DNS visibility to as an outsider would. Most likely, this person
will be upset because they cannot see their mail server.

2- No DNS error != not bad.

If you are still stuck using the old DNS server, it could be topologically very
far away. This would lead to really lousy overall performance, because every DNS
query would potentially go to a many-hop away server, instead of just using the
correct local nameserver like a good resolver would.
--

Some users have commented that this was actually working somehow before, but we
need to intentially code it, test it, and ship it.

Otherwise, users get to use the "other UI" feature for solving this problem.
It's called "File | Exit".

Comment 1

[benc]

keywords...

Comment 2

[benc]

neeti: some comments in the newer DNS bugs suggest this is actually working w/
DNS cache. Can you research this?

Comment 3

[benc]

dougt: isn't this RFE the actual current working behavior?

Comment 4

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

nope.  i do not believe that this is supported.

Comment 5

[benc]

Currently, the button does clear the DNS cache, bug 192798.

Comment 6

[gordon]

Brendan was not talking about the DNS cache.  He was talking about which DNS
server is used by the resolver.  Doug checked an inital fix to call res_init
(actually res_ninit) in last May, and Darin  added some fixes last September.

Comment 7

[benc]

right, that is why I referenced it in the other bug, and did not make it a
duplicate.

There had been comments in some bugs that what brendan proposed was actually
working, but I think those were not completely accurate comments. 

This bug is meant to be the place where we could clarify the behavior, which as
I understand it is "no". (There are several DNS behaviors that simply have no
bug that describes the current implementation, and produce a slow trickle of
annoying duplicates. This is one of them.)

Comment 8

[Samir Gehani]

adt: nsbeta1-

Comment 9

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

mass reassigning to nobody.

Comment 10

[Vijay]

well the DNS server sometimes not working once restarting the modem then it will work fine in browser.what is the main reason i wont find the solution.

Comment 11

[Dinar]

as i know f5 is normal refresh of page and shift + f5 makes more full refresh and refreshes also dns. but that do not help in soem situations. in this: i have site.domain.com , and i am going to move it to other hosting. i temporarily make a2dissite site, reload apache configs, so that users do not change mysql database etc. i have apache config that redirects missing "vhosts" to ip address, and there is written "sites do not work temporarily". then after i have copied files to new hosting, i write new ip address to hosts file, to access to the site, to make some fixes, before it becomes available to users through normal dns. but, when i changed ip address in hosts file, if i open site.domain.com in firefox, it continues to redirect to ip address, so i cannot press shift+f5 (for the address i need, because i have target (of redirect) ip address in address bar) .
but i have found just now, when i was going to report this bug, and searched existing bugs, that seems i need just to wait 30 seconds before firefox refreshes its dns cache.