How To Flush DNS On Solaris

It may be sometime required to flush your DNS Cache mostly when trying to troubleshoot a problem or when youve updated some IP address and need to kill some active connections. On the command line of the Solaris server you can flush dns just as you can through the command prompt on a Windows Box (cmd > ipconfig /flushdns)

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

All it needs is to restart the Daemon to flush the DNS cache.

One the command line you can see the name server cache daemon process running by entering the following command

 ps -ef | grep nscd

This will give you back the process id # you will need to kill the daemon in order to restart the process

Now on the command line enter the following

pkill

Example: pkill 9955

Or just:

kill <process id #>

Example: kill 9955

Now you can check if the nscd process is killed or is still running

ps -ef | grep nscd

Now, restart the nscd daemon by entering

/usr/sbin/nscd

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

Verify that is is backup and running by:

ps -ef | grep nsd