Bug in resolving host names

[Michael Lindner]

I have rediscovered a bug reported in 2000 and again in 2002, which is 
still present in current versions of the code:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-alpha/2000-11/msg00172.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-glibc/2002/09/msg00097.html

The claim at the time was it was not a bug, it was as designed:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-glibc/2002/09/msg00099.html

Quite frankly, if it was designed that way, then the design has a bug.

I am trying to help my company (IDT) to switch several thousand machines 
from SCO to Linux. These machines are taking real-time phone traffic, 
and unless I can figure out a way to keep application code from hanging 
for 30 seconds or so if DNS is down, even though the hosts it's trying 
to lookup are all in /etc/hosts, we are switching back to SCO.

Please help.
--
Michael Lindner