Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Change No. 296: Goodbye lookupd -flushcache, Hello dscacheutil -flushcache
One suggestion that Verizon had that did sound useful (the first person I spoke with was totally lost but the second seemed to know what he was talking about) was trying to clear the DNS cache. Now even I'm totally lost as to what that really means, but sometimes the DNS cache can mess up connectivity to the internet. This happened to me once before and I had to "flush the DNS cache" before things got back to normal. A long time ago I remember somebody had made a little Mac OS X program where you just press a button to do this. That program appears to be no more, but I recalled that you can also do this via the command line.
A few minutes of googling and I found the command:
lookupd -flushcache
. Entering that, however, just got me -bash: lookupd: command not found
. So I tried putting a sudo
in front of that, as the internets directed me, but the result was the same. Some websites even said that you might want to begin it with su
, or put a su
in before entering it (this appears to be a pretty dangerous stunt, judging by the dire warnings that seemed to accompany the descriptions of su
, but I dove in with the reckless abandon of an overly confident advanced-but-not-technically-inclined user), but again to no avail. In fact, this put another obstacle in my path: after doing the whole password bit as required by su
, the result was su: Sorry
. Huh?So it was back to hitting the internets. A few more rounds of googling had me convinced that
lookupd -flushcache
was right. This is, until I came across this bit in Macsploitation. After running into the same problem as me, the author, who is clearly more technically inclined than me, was digging around in his computer's man pages (I just barely fended off the temptation to insert a male pornography joke here), which apparently can tell you all about these commands, and discovered that the command to flush the DNS cache has indeed been changed.You'll be pleased to find out that in Mac OS X Leopard you can flush the DNS cache by entering
dscacheutil -flushcache
in the Terminal.And it's as simple as that.
So does anyone who is a bit more technically inclined than me have any idea as to why this might be an improvement? (I'd like to maintain my optimistic assumption that if it weren't an improvement Apple wouldn't have changed it.)
Unfortunately, this did nothing to fix my connection problem. I went to Starbucks and was able to connect to everything from their computer without a problem on said MacBook Pro and said iBook. I then went to an area covered by my apartment building's wireless network (i.e., the same Verizon connection) and was able to connect without a problem via the same two computers. Yet here, with the ethernet cord plugged directly into these computers, the problem remained. I think I've safely eliminated the possibility that it's our computers. Anyone have any idea what might cause something like this?
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