How to disable reverse dns lookup in python webserver?

Question

i have a simple python cgi server:

import BaseHTTPServer
import CGIHTTPServer
import cgitb; cgitb.enable()  ## This line enables CGI error reporting

server = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer
handler = CGIHTTPServer.CGIHTTPRequestHandler
server_address = ("", 8000)
httpd = server(server_address, handler)
httpd.serve_forever()

the server does a reverse dns lookup on every request for logging purposes onto the screen. there is no dns server available as i am running the server in a local network setting. so every reverse dns lookup leads to lookup timeout, delaying the server's response. how can i disable the dns lookup? i didn't find an answer in the python docs.

Answer 1

You can subclass your own handler class, which won't do the DNS lookups. This follows from http://docs.python.org/library/cgihttpserver.html#module-CGIHTTPServer which says CGIHTTPRequestHandler is interface compatible with BaseHTTPRequestHandler and BaseHTTPRequestHandler has a method address_string().

class MyHandler(CGIHTTPServer.CGIHTTPRequestHandler):

    # Disable logging DNS lookups
    def address_string(self):
        return str(self.client_address[0])

handler = MyHandler