localhost is always 127.0.0.1, right? Nope, can also be ::1 if your system only has IPV6 (apparently).

Asking a DNS server for an A record for localhost should give you back 127.0.0.1 right? Nope – it varies wildly! 8.8.8.8 gives me an NXDOMAIN which means it tells you straight up THIS DOMAIN DOES NOT EXIST! Which is true, since localhost isn’t a domain. But if you ask the same thing of any dnsmasq server, it’ll tell you localhost is 127.0.0.1. Other servers vary wildly – I found one that returned an NXDOMAIN for AAAA but 127.0.0.1 for A (which is pretty wild, since NXDOMAIN makes most software treat the domain as not existing and not attempt other lookups). So localhost and DNS servers don’t mix very well.

But why is this a problem, in general? Most DNS resolution happens via gethostbyname libc call, which reads /etc/hosts properly, right? Problem there is that there is popular software that’s completely asynchronous (cough_nginx_cough) that does not use gethostbyname (since that’s synchronous) and directly queries DNS servers (asynchronously). This works perfectly well until you try to hit localhost and it tells you ‘no such thing!’.

I should probably file a bug with nginx to have them read /etc/hosts as well, and in the mean-time work around by sending 127.0.0.1 to nginx rather than localhost.

How did your thursday go?