Richard;
We changed the servername parameter in dsm.opt to an ip number on
November 7th, and there have been no repeats of this error.
Thank you for your help,
Keith Arbogast
Indiana University

On Nov 6, 2006, at 5:45 PM, Keith Arbogast wrote:


    ...I don't understand how the error occurs on some days, but not
    others. ...

Hello, Keith -

As noted in ADSM QuickFacts, the -53 can be indicative of DNS
irregularities in your environment.  I've seen many instances over
the years where name service can be flakey, with late responses and
timeouts and even unintended servers getting into the production
rotation with faulty caches.  I expect that your client options file
is using network hostnames in its coding.  Instead, try IP addresses:
if the problem goes away, then it's a DNS issue.  Check to see what
those boxes are pointing to for DNS servers, verify if those are
proper for your environment, then heavily probe supposedly valid DNS
servers with the 'dig' command or similar and see what kind of
responsiveness you get. (Use the form 'dig @111.222.333.444
somehost.indiana.edu', where the IP address is that of the DNS server
whose operation is to be tested.)

    Richard Sims       http://people.bu.edu/rbs