If you’re like me, you end up doing a lot of testing in virtual machines. I run several VMs that do various different tasks for me so that I don’t have to sully my Mac with packages I rarely need, etc. So what I do is create a VM and give it a local hostname defined in my /etc/hosts file.
Recently, after my upgrade to OSX Lion, I started running into an issue where it would take over 5 seconds to connect to any of my VMs using any protocol (SSH, HTTP, etc). After several hours of troubleshooting, and several Wireshark sessions later, the truth of the matter was plain: