FS#30944 - [glibc] error in gethostbyname()

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Matthias Dienstbier (fs4000) - Tuesday, 31 July 2012, 18:43 GMT
Last edited by Allan McRae (Allan) - Wednesday, 01 August 2012, 13:04 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Core
Status Closed
Assigned To Allan McRae (Allan)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

I just discovered a weird bug. When I go to www.sparhandy.de in Chromium I get a DNS error but Firefox and Epiphany can display the website. Then I noticed that I cannot ping that host either:

$ ping www.sparhandy.de
ping: unknown host www.sparhandy.de

and tracepath:

$ tracepath www.sparhandy.de
gethostbyname: Unknown host

dig gives me this result:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.sparhandy.de. 300 IN CNAME sparhandy.de.
www.sparhandy.de. 300 IN A 80.237.187.220

Seems like a misconfiguration of their DNS which cannot be handled by the obsoleted gethostbyname(). But all programs utilizing getaddrinfo() work flawlessly.

I hope somebody can reproduce this. Some DNS servers seem to correct the answer. For example there is no problem with Google's DNS 8.8.8.8
This task depends upon

Closed by  Allan McRae (Allan)
Wednesday, 01 August 2012, 13:04 GMT
Reason for closing:  Not a bug
Comment by Allan McRae (Allan) - Tuesday, 31 July 2012, 21:47 GMT
"Seems like a misconfiguration of their DNS which cannot be handled by the obsoleted gethostbyname()" So how is this a bug?
Comment by Matthias Dienstbier (fs4000) - Tuesday, 31 July 2012, 22:25 GMT
Well, I'm pretty sure it works with other operating systems. Otherwise they would have noticed. And why doesn't getaddrinfo() have any problems? And of course why are some programs still using obsoleted functions?
EDIT: I'm just trying Fedora and here are exactly the same problems. I probably should ask upstream if this is inteded.
Comment by Allan McRae (Allan) - Wednesday, 01 August 2012, 13:04 GMT
This is a known "issue" with newer glibc releases not supporting broken DNS servers. There is a patch in the current glibc package that works around the biggest issues with it (and is used in Fedora, openSUSE, Gentoo...) but has not been included upstream yet.

The solution is not to use a broken DNS server. Not much more can be done here.

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