538822 - Frequent But Not Persistent DNS Failures

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[David E. Ross]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091206 SeaMonkey/2.0.1
Build Identifier: 

Starting with SeaMonkey 2, I notice frequent failures to resolve domains.  If I click on a link, I often get the alert popup with the message "xxx could not be found.  Please check and try again."  I dismiss the popup and immediately try the link again.  Usually, the second attempt is successful.  

This is happening with bookmark entries that have worked in the past and (as indicated above) work immediately after observing the problem.  This is also happening with links within Web pages, which again work immediately after observing the problem. 

The cited URI is a link on the Web page at <http://medlineplus.gov/>.  For that link, I have seen this problem more than once in less than an hour.  Each time, immediately selecting the link a second time successfully brought up the page.  

However, this problem is being seen at many other URIs.  This is not a problem peculiar to the cited URI.  

Reproducible: Sometimes




Note that I have set 
    user_pref("browser.xul.error_pages.enabled", false);
to give a popup instead of an error page when SeaMonkey cannot connect to a domain.  

Unfortunately, I cannot yet install the LiveHTTPHeaders extension.  The current version does not work with SeaMonkey 2.0.

Comment 1

[David E. Ross]

Attachment: alert popup seen when DNS fails

This is the alert popup I have seen when trying to reach the cited URI.

Comment 2

[David E. Ross]

After I started seeing this problem with other Internet clients, I investigated further.  It turns out that the problem was caused by setting my TCP/IP properties to obtain the DNS IP address automatically, PER THE SUGGESTION OF MY ISP.  I'm now using static IP addresses for the primary and secondary DNS, which seems to have solved the problem.