Subprocess puzzle and two questions

[Nobody]

On Wed, 14 Nov 2012 20:49:19 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:

>> I'm slightly surprised that there's no way with the Python stdlib to 
>> point a DNS query at a specific server
> 
> Me too, including the "only slightly" part.  The normal high-level C 
> resolver routines (getaddrinfo/getnameinfo, or even the old 
> gethostbyname series), don't expose any way to do that.

That's because the high-level routines aren't tied to DNS.

gethostbyname() and getaddrinfo() use the NSS (name-service switch)
mechanism, which is configured via /etc/nsswitch.conf. Depending upon
configuration, hostnames can be looked up via a plain text file
(/etc/hosts), Berkeley DB files, DNS, NIS, NIS+, LDAP, WINS, etc. DNS is
just one particular back-end, which may or may not be used on any given
system.

If you specifically want to perform DNS queries, you have to use a
DNS-specific interface (e.g. the res_* functions described in the
resolver(3) manpage), or raw sockets, rather than a high-level interface
such as gethostbyname() or getaddrinfo().