lookupd dying

[genecutl]

I've figured out that the weird problems I've occasionally been having on my OS X computer are due to the lookupd daemon dying. Symptoms are: terminal asks for password (which it rejects), anything else requiring authentication doesn't work, programs like web browsers and email programs don't work because domain name lookup isn't functioning.

If I restart lookupd (using BBEdit, since I can't use the terminal), it mostly goes back to normal, though I'm unable to get software update to hook on to the new lookupd process.

Does anyone know what might be killing lookupd? This is happening a few times a week now and it's quite annoying.

 

[genecutl]

Sorry, I hadn't seen your reply to the other post (I was expecting the email notification).

I agree that I don't think that there's a process that's deliberately killing lookupd, but probably that it is crashing for some reason. I didn't see anything obvious in my system.log. What I am seeing are error messages from some mounted nfs partitions, which I guess may be related:

localhost netinfod local[231]: notify's udp binder connection to server1[192.168.nn.nnn]/local failed during opening (UDP) - socket_open failed
localhost netinfod local[231]: update 0 to server2[255.255.255.255]/local failed during binder contacting - couldn't getregister

I thought about writing that little script too, but now that I've figured out how to restart lookupd by running a script with BBEdit, that's not really necessary. I'd prefer to get to the bottom of the problem.

As far as hardware, the only thing special is a scsi card and hard drive, but I've had that for a long time and this just started recently.