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When reloading config (specifically for proxy_pass) - occasionally this will be seen: nginx: [emerg] host not found in upstream

However - the upstream server's name WILL resolve in the os (linux) - only nginx seems to have this problem.

This seems to be a recent regression - as it didn't seem to happen previous to 1.0.10 versions.

Has anyone noticed this recently?

Trying to narrow down places to search.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Nginx internally caches DNS for 5 minutes (not sure if this is configurable in later versions). Perhaps your resolver is failing for some reason, then Nginx caches this result.

I have seen this on systems with IPv6 enabled since be default the resolver requests both IPv4 and IPv6 records in parallel. This can be seen as a flood by the resolver resulting in a temporary DNS issue. I saw this popup on a box with a lot of email traffic when doing domain name verification.

Try adding:

  options single-request

to /etc/resolv.conf

This causes IPv6/v4 lookups to be done sequentially.

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  • Thanks for your answer. It turned out this was an error with messing up the hostnames in the config files. Oops. But your answer is actually really useful anyway - so I will mark it as the right one - as it would cause DNS issues, for sure (blasting it with requests).
    – Michael Neale
    Jan 31, 2012 at 3:35
  • 2
    I have the same issue - what exactly did you do in the config files to fix this (thanks in advance)
    – Zabs
    Oct 27, 2014 at 10:58
  • You can now add the value=30s option to the resolver to define how long a resolved IP address should be kept in the resolver's caches.
    – Alexis Wilke
    Mar 15, 2019 at 17:52

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