166796 - DNS: something, anything that tells me what DNS server is in use.

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, enhancement)

Description

[benc]

There should be some interface, DNS manager, about DNS, whatever, that shows
several things, I've placed them in highest priority first:

1- List of DNS servers currently in use.
2- Button to reset DNS servers
3- List of cached DNS entries + expiration times (if any)
4- Button to reset individual or all DNS cached entires.

Darin and I have spent a lot of time basically screwing around with packet
traces and guessing something that should just simply be viewable by the user.

I took a quick look and found that there are roughly 50 bugs that have summaries
that start w/ "DNS:" and another 50 "Conn:" (half of which probably are related
to the same problems). So I'd say there have been roughly 75 bugs filed where
people are trying to figure out why DNS is not working right for them, in almost
every case, a lack of transparency for just what the browser thinks is going on
has hindered their ability to help them help us.

I also think that on our end, we've done a less than sufficient job of actually
isolating the bugs, defining them clearly and marking the dupes correctly. This
is caused, in part, by our inability to easily see if we are just sitting around
using the wrong DNS servers due to some silliness nobody can easily explain at
the time.

Comment 1

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

Err. mozilla doesn't know what DNS server is being used. WE just ask the OS (via
NSPR) to look up an address for us, which may not even be done via dns (thin
NIS/WINS). We do do caching, though (internally)

Comment 2

[benc]

I'm most concerned with Linux right now. Where is the server list held, because
it seems to get out of sync w/ /etc/resolv.conf, and this is a problem only w/
Mozilla, but no w/ other utilities.

Comment 3

[tenthumbs]

/etc/resolv.conf is used by the DNS resolver, /etc/nsswitch.conf determines how
glibc chooses resolvers. You may need to look at both.

Comment 4

[Tom Mraz]

Changing to Linux but probably should be OS->All.

Comment 5

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

over to you gordon.

Comment 6

[gordon]

Seems like Ben's question concerning where to look for dns servers/resolvers has
been answered.

The DNS cache (both DNS service and socket transport caches) can be flushed by
going offline and online again.  DNS Service expiration time is set by the
network.dnsCacheExpiration pref or is 5 minutes by default.  The socket
transport DNS cache is 'forever' or until mozilla shutsdown or goes offline.

Comment 7

[benc]

VERIFIED/wontfix.