How to Flush Linux DNS Cache (NSCD)
Tags: cache, clear, DNS, flush, hosts, linux, nscd, reset, sysadmin
If you notice that your linux machine is holding on to old DNS entries and you are running the nscd service there is a good chance that invalidating (flushing) the NSCD hosts database will help. This is roughly the linux equivalent to ipconfig /flushdns on windows or dscacheutil -flushcache on os x.
nscd -i hosts |
From the NSCD man page:
The daemon will try to watch for changes in configuration files appropriate for each database (e.g. /etc/passwd for the passwd database or /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf for the hosts database), and flush the cache when these are changed. However, this will happen only after a short delay (unless the inotify(7) mechanism is available and glibc 2.9 or later is available), and this auto-detection does not cover configuration files required by nonstandard NSS modules, if any are specified in /etc/nsswitch.conf. In that case, you need to run the following command after changing the configuration file of the database so that nscd invalidates its cache: $ nscd -i <database> |
