Comment 9 for bug 326718

I notice RedHatters are experiencing this as well with glibc 2.9.x, although it may be stirred in with other issues:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=459756

Everyone seems to be poking at it rather blindly right now; my own (uneducated) guess is that even in relatively sane configurations, there can be a race based on the order in which A and AAAA answers are returned, absent more mechanisms to ensure good A answers aren't discarded or ignored in favor of AAAA on systems that really only have IPv4 routes anyway.

[If this is the case... then the idea in the RedHat bug is probably not bad; being able to specify policy in nsswitch.conf along the lines of "hosts: files dnsv4 [notfound=continue] dnsv6" would 'prefer' A responses without masking the existence of v6-only systems that only have AAAA records, not A.]

I'm surprised this isn't getting more attention - am I alone, or is it that anyone else affected is having trouble reaching bugs.launchpad.net to comment? :}