Those of you who’ve used MSN via Adium on Leopard may have observed Adium taking a very long time to connect, or not connecting at all. A lot of you sent us bug reports about this.

The problem wasn’t a bug in Adium, or even in Libpurple. In Mac OS X 10.5.0, Apple changed the way it looks up hostnames, such as the one for the MSN server. They changed it to use a “SRV” request instead of an “A” request.

Unfortunately, some ISPs’ domain-name servers only knew how to handle “A” requests, and would ignore the “SRV” requests. That’s what was causing the problem: broken domain-name servers.

In Mac OS X 10.5.3, Apple changed its lookup method back to the earlier behavior. So, for those of you who had this problem, MSN should now connect again, without workarounds such as using OpenDNS.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 2:11 PM by Peter Hosey and is filed under fixage, Leopard, MSN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.