Martin v. Löwis <martin@v.loewis.de> wrote:
That's a common OSX problem/bug. Processes occasionally lose the ability to resolve host names. Various theories float around what's causing this (most commonly, people expect that a "controlling terminal" must be present); my theory is this:
There is a Mach port in the system that lets a process talk to the local resolver (lookupd, or whatever Apple's naming infrastructure is called today). For some reason, this port gets closed in a "background" process, perhaps because the parent process closed it when you logged out. Or the Kerberos credentials expired, or some such...
In short, if some OS X expert could shed some light on this, it would be appreciated. It would then be good to add this to the wiki. See also
This is as close to an explanation as I've been able to get from Apple: http://lists.apple.com/archives/Darwin-kernel/2009/Apr/msg00016.html
http://buildbot.net/trac/wiki/UsingLaunchd http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2005/tn2083.html
Regards, Martin