AppleInsider Staff
In an apparent effort to fix DNS errors seen in recent OS X 10.10 versions, Apple's latest Yosemite beta shows the buggy discoveryd service replaced with mDNSResponder, a process last implemented in OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
With the OS X 10.10.4 beta, released on Tuesday, Apple reinstated mDNSResponder to handle DNS processes previously assigned to discoveryd since the debut of OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
As reported by ArsTechnica earlier this year, discovered discoveryd would repeatedly fail to resolve device names, duplicate machine names and cause other network problems that led to general system slowdowns. The process was also attributed to various Wi-Fi issues.
The discoveryd service was thought to be linked with Handoff functionality, which debuted alongside Yosemite and iOS 8, but those features appear to be operational even with the transfer to mDNSResponder.
It is not clear if Apple plans to permanently fall back to mDNSResponsder when OS X 10.10.4 launches, or is merely using the older service as a stopgap solution as it works to fix discoveryd.
Malcolm Owen
Marko Zivkovic
Andrew Orr
Christine McKee
Andrew O'Hara
25 Comments
From the reports I've seen discoveryd should never have been shipped. Glad to see someone's finally admitted the issue.
Holy crap Batman, I am now seeing over 50 wifi routers from our neighborhood, I saw 4 before this update! EDIT ... oops I forgot the /joke tag! :)
http://furbo.org/2015/05/05/discoveryd-clusterfuck/ Here's some detail as to why it was a mess. Sorry for the language.
This really isn't surprising. Apple has never given networking the attention it needs. I managed a post house full of Macs, Xserves, Linux machines and PCs. While networking on the Macs was okay, there were problems. Particularly as Apple "improved" things by dropping Samba. We kept things very simple with all Macs running in an admin account. We did not use Active Directory until I tried using the Xserves to host some Wiki stuff. That was fun. Anyway the point is when Apple began to empower Macs to interface with the rest of the computer world, they did not do their usual high quality work. It's almost like the OS people don't like to be bothered with all that networking stuff, and they end up hiring people who can't do the job. Or they are not allowed to do the job. Imagine if Apple decided to make their networking top notch and hired the best and brightest out there. It would certainly help them out in the business world - both for Macs and iOS. At this juncture we can only assume they either don't hire well, or don't budget well for networking in OS development.
This really isn't surprising.
It’s amazing how this jerkwater, douchebag outfit stays in business isn’t it.