Ever since upgrading to Snow Leopard, my MacBook Pro often was unable to see the local network hosts. It turns out the mDNSResponder, now responsible for DNS caching, is rotating the order of the DNS Servers. Since I have my own DNS server that is the authority for my network, this should always be the first one checked. As it is also a home network, it made sense to have a backup DNS server pushed out via DHCP. However, it turns out that having the backup DNS server (my favorite: OpenDNS) in case the local one fails, actually causes the problem on the Snow Leopard machines.

I found a great amount of information regarding this at the Apple Support Discussions list. If this issue plagues you, many of the messages in this thread are a worthwhile read.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 11:33 am and is filed under WILT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.