I've got an application that does SNMP monitoring and
has a thread listening with SimpleXMLRPCServer for
remote control.  I noticed the XMLRPC listener logging
an incorrect address while snmp jobs were processing:

sw1.west.spy.net - - [04/Apr/2002 01:16:37] "POST /RPC2
HTTP/1.0" 200 -
localhost.west.spy.net - - [04/Apr/2002 01:16:43] "POST
/RPC2 HTTP/1.0" 200 -

sw1 is one of the machines that is being queried, but
the XMLRPC requests are happening over localhost.

gethostbyname() and gethostbyaddr() both return static
data, thus they aren't reentrant.

As a workaround, I copied socket.py to my working
directory and added the following to it:

try:
    import threading
except ImportError, ie:
    sys.stderr.write(str(ie) + "\n")

# mutex for DNS lookups
__dns_mutex=None
try:
    __dns_mutex=threading.Lock()
except NameError:
    pass

def __lock():
    if __dns_mutex!=None:
        __dns_mutex.acquire()
    
def __unlock():
    if __dns_mutex!=None:
        __dns_mutex.release()
    
def gethostbyaddr(addr):
    """Override gethostbyaddr to try to get some thread
safety."""
    rv=None
    try:
        __lock()
        rv=_socket.gethostbyaddr(addr)
    finally:
        __unlock()
    return rv

def gethostbyname(name):
    """Override gethostbyname to try to get some thread
safety."""
    rv=None
    try:
        __lock()
        rv=_socket.gethostbyname(name)
    finally:
        __unlock()
    return rv