Bad Hostname Error?

Server NGINX
1

Hi everyone,

Every once in a while, requests to my NGINX server are giving 500
errors as with bad hostname responses for http://:

Can’t connect to sub.mydomain.com:80 (Bad hostname: sub.mydomain.com)

It turned out to be an issue with the DNS server, i.e. my ubuntu box
is failing to resolve this sub.mydomain.com address.

What I don’t understand is that why is NGINX making an ns lookup for
these requests??? Basically, when I make a request to this subdomain,
it should be resolving the request using the request header and proxy
it to localhost:81 or serving from local directory. And, I don’t see
any reason to perform an nslookup here?

My config file is as follows:

server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6

    server_name  sub.mydomain.com;
    server_tokens off;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log info;

    location / {
            proxy_pass              http://localhost:81;
            proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For

$proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
}

    location /html {
            alias /home/user/html/
            expires max;
    }

}

DNS lookups will slow the server down, and trying to understand what
is going on here
Thanks…

2

Hello!

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 12:54:28AM +0200, Cabbar D. wrote:

What I don’t understand is that why is NGINX making an ns lookup for
these requests??? Basically, when I make a request to this subdomain,
it should be resolving the request using the request header and proxy
it to localhost:81 or serving from local directory. And, I don’t see
any reason to perform an nslookup here?

The message you’ve provided suggests it’s from your browser
(proxy?), not from nginx.

    error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log info;
            alias /home/user/html/
            expires max;
    }

}

DNS lookups will slow the server down, and trying to understand what
is going on here
Thanks…

With such configuration nginx will only do a “localhost” name
lookup once during configuration parsing.

Maxim D.

3

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 1:50 AM, Maxim D. [email protected]
wrote:

(proxy?), not from nginx.
It is actually a perl script on the same machine that is doing the
HTTP GET. And, the fact that it is giving a 500 error with an html
response made me think that it was NGINX that was replying, not the
browser / perl script ? But, I guess you are right… Thanks for
clarifying this.

access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
location /html {

lookup once during configuration parsing.
Ah cool! So, there is no performance hit here.

Thanks a ton for the explanation.