Hooray!
My iBook has been periodically hanging up recently. The cursor would get jittery and the kernel would start using over 60% of the CPU, rendering the machine useless. MacFixIt ran a report (reg. req’d, pdf) on that issue that had some interesting information indicating that the issue was related to lookupd and dns. Yesterday, they ran an updated story (reg. req’d, pdf) that pinned the issue to a particular domain that was messing up lookupd. And finally a solution that worked:
Enter the following command in the Terminal (located in Applications/Utilities) and press return:
sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /etc/hosts
This will open the /etc/hosts file in the TextEdit application.
Add the line:
127.0.0.1 js.adsonar.com
to the end of the file (under hosts) and save. You’ll be running in root at this point, so quit TextEdit immediately and do not modify any other files.
Ahhhh. With any luck, Apple will block adsonar.com all together with a security update, but that seems unlikely.
Update: It started again. My usual state of being for my laptop is to be plugged in to ethernet, and connected to wireless, so if I move from my desk, connectivity keeps going. I have found that turning off airport resolves this issue, but when I turn it back on, the issue comes back immediately.