I'm noticing that the pkgsrc make fetch on mozilla is dying on an IP
which is unreachable from my location.

But the A rec has like 10+ IPv4 A records associated with it.

Is there some nasty non-round-robin DNS cacheing going on somewhere? If
there was, could it be local to my own host? I can't see how: the fetch
commands are discrete calls to shell-exec() on the fetch process, so
each instance should do the gethostbyname() itself and get a different
order.

Equally, why is it taking one IP out of the set, and not attempting to
TCP/IP connect to the alternate IPs?

-George