MacPorts bind9 dig not working correctly

[Larry Stone]

I’m fairly new to MacPorts and just installed it on a Macintosh I use for, among other thing, network monitoring. One of things it does is check that other computers on our network are up by getting the current IP address for the computer by using dig to make a mDNS query (dig +short @224.0.0.251 -p 5353 hostname.local). 

With the MacPorts version of dig provided in the Bind9 port, it fails:
/opt/local/bin/dig +short @224.0.0.251 -p 5353 hostname.local
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

Using the Apple provided version in /usr/bin, it works:
/usr/bin/dig +short @224.0.0.251 -p 5353 hostname.local
192.168.0.82

And on an older system where I had built Bind from source, it works:
/usr/local/bin/dig +short @224.0.0.251 -p 5353 hostname.local
192.168.0.82

The MacPorts version of dig works fine for regular DNS queries. It’s only when adding "@224.0.0.251 -p 5353” for the mDNS query that it fails. Any ideas as to why this fails with the MacPorts version?

-- 
Larry Stone
lstone19 at stonejongleux.com