Comment 35 for bug 94940

After reading through related bugs, it looks like avahi / nss is trying multicast dns before traditional dns. With multicast DNS, the only real option is long timeouts and retries, since only one avahi-enabled machine on the network may have a response for a given request. (That is, a successful lookup could have NXDomain responses from all but one host.) Since IP networks are assumed unreliable, it makes sense to retry requests, since the request may not have reached the one host that has the record.

I'm not sure that there's an easy way to fix this. Anything we did to fix this issue would weaken multicast dns (lower the timeout, reduce the number of retries, etc). It's unfortunate that currently this impacts servers that have no use for avahi-style multicast dns, since avahi mdns is enabled by default on many systems (eg. gutsy).