On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Mark Stosberg <mark at summersault.com> wrote:
> Perhaps Slony aggressively caches DNS? Or perhaps it could recover from
> this "FATAL" condition? Is this expected behavior, or should slony
> behave better in the face of temporary DNS problems?

Slony does nothing concerning cacheing DNS.

It simply uses the libpq function, PQconnectdb(conninfo) to connect to
databases.

All the relevant code is localized to src/slon/dbutils.c, so you can
poke at the code if you want to.

I think you'll find that other clients that attempted to use libpq,
such as psql, would fail pretty much identically.

Is it possible that your libc is doing cacheing?  If *that's* the
case, and I'm suspicious of it, then you really would need to restart
the slon to get "unstuck" from what libc has cached on you...