merk

one more update - i found a reliable way to reproduce the temporary fix, and to break it again. Adding the app pool user to the admin group AND running iisreset will fix it. But only IISRESET. Stopping and starting IIS using the iis control panel doesn't do anything, nor does recycling the app pool. I can switch the user back to a regular user account and as long as i don't use iisreset, it will keep working. Once I run iisreset, it'll stop working until i add the user back to the admin account and reset again. I tried running iisreset a few times without making any changes to the app pool user account, and it didn't change behavior unless i changed the account type of the app pool user. I'm not sure what is different between running iisreset and using the stop/start function in the iis control panel, but there's something going on there.

well, one more update - someone else asked if restarting IIS would do anything - it broke it again. Only now running it under an admin account didn't do anything this time. So now i really have no clue at all why it worked once as admin and now it doesn't.

thanks - so far i don't need a 3rd party dns library but I'll hang on to it. If i ever figure out what the issue was, I'll try to remember to come back here and post an update.

ah - sorry for the confusion again. I was not using dns_get_record with email - after i realized the built in smtp functions weren't able to resolve the hostname, I then used dns_get_record to test resolving the hostname on my own and then that's how i found out it was actually the dns lookup that was failing and not something specific to the smtp functions.

no, no reason i can't just use the IP address for email. But it's not just that - there might be other bits of code somewhere that need to resolve a hostname. That just happened to be the first thing i was working on and noticed the error. Plus I just don't like not knowing why something relatively basic like that wouldn't work - or would only work when you run it as admin once.

Yes i suppose it is - it was setup this way by the host (it's a virtual godaddy server). There are two network adapters - a virtual ethernet and something called 'floating ips' which is a loopback address. You think the dns query might have been trying to use the wrong interface?

Sorry for being confusing - initially, i was unable to send email. I thought the problem was with the code for sending the email, and then eventually realized it wasn't resolving the mail servers hostname. Which is what led me to discover the dns query wasn't working. I was able to send email by using the mail server's IP address. Which is how I tested if php was able to make any outgoing connections. As far as I know, the only function I tried which would have resulted in a dns query was sending email, when it tried to resolve the smtp hostname. And me testing dns_get_record directly. If you are sure there's no sort of cache or temp file that's written to, then I'm pretty much stumped as to what's going on. I can't think of a scenario where running it just once as admin would fix it.

I had already thought of it not having network access but i ruled that out since I was able to send an email. Not being able to send an email is what started me on all this in the first place since the email was failing to send since it wasn't able to resolve the mailserver's hostname. I just tried using file_get_contents for the hell of it and it worked. Can you think of any sort of temp/cache file that might be used doing a dns query? Because that's the only scenario i can think of right now where it would start working after running under an admin account, but then keep working even after it's no longer running as an admin. If it were a network access issue, then it should have stopped working after i removed it from the admin account. The account the app pool is running under now is just part of the users group. I also tried running it under one of the default app pools just in case i did something when i created my app pool, but it behaved the same no matter which pool it was running under.

I made some progress. Since it felt like this was some sort of permission issue, i decided to add the app pool user to the admin group. When i did this and then ran the webpage, it worked. Surprisingly, it kept working even after i removed the user from the admin group. It even works on both versions of php now. My guess is it needed to write to some temp/cache file that did not exist and it did not have permission to create the file. When I added it to the admin group, it was able to create the file. And it has sufficient permission to write to the file without being in the admin group. But that's just a guess. If anyone has any ideas as to what the specific problem was please let me know, so I can be sure it's really fixed. Thanks

I've set display_errors to on so i can see what's happening. Warning: dns_get_record(): Dns Query failed in test.php on line 47 PHP Warning: dns_get_record(): Dns Query failed in test.php on line 47 The other lines in this file are irrelevant since I've commented them all out. The only code executing is the one line of code I included in my original post.

Hi all, In the process of moving websites off an old win 2008 server and onto a new win 2016 server. I discovered that dns_get_record is failing on the new server. I made a simple test page: $dnsrecs = dns_get_record('google.com'); When i call this as a webpage, it comes back with dns query failed. It comes back instantly, so it's not like it's timing out. But, if i just call the webpage from the command line, it comes back with the dns record. Why would dns_get_record fail when used in a webpage, but work from the command line? I can make outside connections since I was able to send an email to an smtp server. I thought maybe this is a permission issue, but seems odd I'd be able to send an email using php but not do a dns query. Oh, and I have two versions of php installed on this server - 5.4.10 and 7.4.9. The old version is a direct copy from the 2008 server. 7.4.9 is a clean install. Both of them behave the same way. webpage fails, command line works. Also, nslookup works. I also tried switching to using google's name server, but it had no effect on anything. Anyone have any suggestions?