How to Flush DNS Cache in Sun Solaris

It may be sometime required to flush your DNS Cache mostly when trying to troubleshoot a problem with your name service or when there was an invalid DNS entry after a server outage. The possible solution to clear these cached invalid entries or to wait till the record expires based on its TTL (Time To Live)

The NSCD daemon in Solaris and ofcourse in UNIX and most of the Linux falvors maintains the system cache including the DNS/Name service cache.

All it needs is to restart the nscd aemon to flush the DNS cache.

Do a

# ps -ef|grep nscd

This will find the PID for the NSCD daemon.

Now, do a

#pkill <PID>

#kill <PID>

Now, check if the nscd process is killed by using

# ps -ef|grep nscd

Now, start the nscd daemon by using

#/usr/sbin/nscd

 This should start the nscd daemon and there you go, you have flushed the DNS Cache in your Solaris Server.

Click here for the man page for NSCD in Solaris