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waw74

macrumors 601
Original poster
May 27, 2008
4,918
1,110
I've had this issue for the past few weeks on my phone (could have been the OS update, but my life's been hectic), and just started on the Mac with the update to Ventura, so I'm guessing someone in Cupertino had a brilliant ideal.

this worked for years on both iOS and MacOS before the current versions.

I've got a PF sense router, a web server box on my network, and a dynamicDNS service (no-ip.com)
I set up Split DNS on the the PFsense, with a host override, so if I was on my internal network, my DDNS name would just send me to the internal IP of my server. Also use this for SSHing into the server.

that's all broken now

I can use dig or nslookup on my dynamicDNS name, and it returns the internal IP as it's supposed to
if I try to ping my DDNS name, it uses the external. When I use Safari or try to ssh into the server, it just hangs, so I'm assuming it's trying the external
dscacheutil -q host -a name ____ returns the external IP


And just for fun... For several years, I've been using a web app made with fluid app. (just an app that runs a single site browser) and that works like it's supposed to.

I've tried flushing the dnscache repeatedly (sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder;sudo killall mDNSResponderHelper;sudo dscacheutil -flushcache) with no success.
I've also fooled around with DNS settings in pfsense, and no luck there either.

so either safari and ping among others are using some new "improved" system for DNS, or it's not really flushing, or something.
 
I am having this problem with the latest version of Ventura 13.2.1 (and dig and nslookup work just fine)

However, I discovered that if I kill the mDnsResponder and its helper, they immediately restart and everything works perfectly.

This is 100% reproducible (including the fix) --- I shut down my Mac, restarted it, dns fails, kill -9 those processes and dns immediately starts working.

(By the way, I also use a pfSense router but the problem is clearly in mDNSResponder. I'm guessing that it's starting up before there's a legitimate IP address and it just hangs.
 
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