I was experiencing problems with dnscache not resolving certain domains. On inspection, it turned out to be akamai-hosted domains that were failing. A quick google turned up this thread from 2004 (!), and a little further digging turned up this patch . I tweaked the patch a little to set QUERY_MAXLOOP to 1000 (original value: 100, value in patch: 160), and rebuilt. All works just fine now: [robin@dist ~]$ env DNSCACHEIP=192.168.1.90 dnsqr A www.cisco.com 1 www.cisco.com: 212 bytes, 1+5+0+0 records, response, noerror query: 1 www.cisco.com answer: www.cisco.com 0 CNAME www.cisco.com.akadns.net answer: www.cisco.com.akadns.net 0 CNAME wwwds.cisco.com.edgekey.net answer: wwwds.cisco.com.edgekey.net 0 CNAME wwwds.cisco.com.edgekey.net.globalredir.akadns.net answer: wwwds.cisco.com.edgekey.net.globalredir.akadns.net 0 CNAME e144.dscb.akamaiedge.net answer: e144.dscb.akamaiedge.net 12 A 2.19.144.170