Something changed in the way dhcpd operates that causes a new nameserver query that 5.1 didn't do. I run diald to demand diald my internet connection on my home machine, and also run dhcpd to allow a laptop to get configured for the home environment (using a Netgear ethernet card for the home network). Under 5.1, if I put all hostnames mentioned in the dhcpd.conf file in /etc/hosts, and set the query to look at files before dns, it would not do an external nameserver query when the dhcpd server started. Now with 5.2, I see the following queries when dhcpd starts: XX /127.0.0.1/1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa/PTR XX /127.0.0.1/201.44.80.192.in-addr.arpa/PTR (192.80.44.201 is the IP address of the host dhcpd is running on). Obviously, I should set up reverse mapping on my local nameserver for addresses it knows about, but it is odd that dhcpd now does this query when it previously didn't do it before.
re-assigned to Erik, who owns this package. :)
Further debugging shows that its not the dhcpd server that seems to be causing the network traffic, but the caching name server that is (dhcpd just happens to be executing when the modem starts dialing). I have worked around the problem by not bringing up the caching name server until the modem is brought up the first time.
The additional information on this implies that it's not a bug in dhcpd after all, so I don't have to fix anything :->