Why DNS in OS X 10.10 is broken, and what you can do to fix it

This article is at best misguided. OS X 10.10 DNS is not broken, it is working as intended - just differently from the past. Standards have changed and many haven&#x27;t noticed.<p>All of the bugs cited have to do with &quot;.local&quot; domains. You should never use .local domains as IANA has designated this domain as a special use domain for Multicast DNS as part of IP Zeroconf and Bonjour. <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6762" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc6762</a><p>Apple has also made this clear here: <a href="http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203136" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT203136</a><p>Yosemite has split the job of unicast and multicast DNS up such that you cannot resolve single-label .local domains with unicast DNS anymore; you MUST use multicast. This is why hosts will resolve with nslookup or dig but not ping. The old behavior with mDNSresponder was arguably legacy backwards compatibility for unicast DNS resolution of .local hosts.<p>(I figured this out the hard way over a weekend using the Googles when my local VMs weren&#x27;t resolving properly via dnsmasq - my fortunes changed when I looked into &quot;.local&quot;).<p>There is one remaining problem with Yosemite DNS I haven&#x27;t figured out yet, and that&#x27;s getting unicast DNS resolution via dnsmasq while offline. Frustrating.

I had the &quot;&lt;hostname&gt; is already in use&quot; problem, the safari not able to resolve any hostname and I could not use wake on demand for almost 2 years because of some bug. Maybe I am unusually unlucky but I agree that the quality of the last OS X releases has clearly got worse. The problem with apple software is that if it doesn&#x27;t &quot;just work&quot; there is little to do about it.<p>I am not so sure about reenabling mDNSResponder. This may cause worse problems.

I downgraded from 10.10 to 10.9 and now my laptop is faster and crashes much less often. I will probably hold on to 10.9 for a few years. At least on this laptop.

To be fair, innovation and replacing battle-hardened^W^Wobsolete system components with new software that&#x27;s pushing the envelope comes at a cost. Apple are doing the right thing here and at this pace, I can see OSX being ready for the desktop soon. I&#x27;m not replacing my Ubuntu box with a Mac just yet, as some of my core productivity apps have a dependency on DNS, but I&#x27;ll be keeping a close eye on OSX for sure.

What kills me about 10.10 is that OSX doesn&#x27;t even try to resolve a domain name if you&#x27;re offline. I run dnsmasq locally, which handles all of my DNS requests, capturing <i>.dev domains (resolving them to 127.0.0.1) and forwarding everything else to Google&#x27;s servers. This is great as long as I&#x27;m connected to WiFi or Ethernet (both are configurable through system preferences) but if I&#x27;m travelling and don&#x27;t have an active network connection - quite frequently, in my case - there&#x27;s not even an </i>attempt* to hit a DNS server. It just fails.<p>I&#x27;m so desperately need a fix to this that I&#x27;m wondering if there&#x27;s some kind of a dongle I can plug into my ethernet or USB port to fake a LAN, just so I can use dnsmasq.<p>The only thing stopping me from wiping out OSX and using Linux full time is the necessity of running Sketch and the Adobe&#x2F;MS Office suite for work purposes. :&#x2F;

I&#x27;ve seen the Safari hangs -- sometimes it won&#x27;t even open a new (empty!) tab. I knew it had to be network related, but forgot that discoveryd is in 10.10 or I would have suspected DNS right away.<p>edit: anyone remember how broken DNS would prevent you from being able to completely login to GNOME? That is what this feels like.

I&#x27;ve come to the realisation that I don&#x27;t trust Apple software much these days. I used to upgrade to the latest version of both phone and computer OS quickly, but these days I&#x27;ll hold on as long as I can - I&#x27;m still on 10.9, and waiting for the inevitable software upgrade that will make me have to pull the trigger.<p>I miss the Snow Leopard days.

I eagerly await a true fix to 10.10&#x27;s issues with dropping wifi connections. Both Macbooks in my house running 10.10 drop the wifi connection at least 5x&#x2F;day, often more. My other devices do not experience these drops, and these same machines were just fine on 10.9.<p>My opinion of Apple&#x27;s software quality has decreased over the past few months.

The networking issues with Yosemite were the final push I needed to shrink it down to a tiny partition and install Linux on my MBP.<p>I&#x27;m a very happy MBP user now, and having a tiling windows manager is such a productivity boost, I doubt I&#x27;ll ever go back.

DNS is broken in 10.10? Haven&#x27;t had a single problem...

Note that no one would have clicked on this article if it said &quot;Why mDNS in OS X 10.10 is broken...&quot;