The ssh problem I reported a little while ago was actually a general network performance problem affecting all TCP connections to non-local hosts. Rebooting the server fixed that problem and the WordPress problem.
I don’t understand what was wrong, nor why rebooting fixed it. I don’t like mysterious problems that go away when you reboot, since they can just as mysteriously reappear later. That’s de rigueur on Windows, but Linux isn’t supposed to be like that (and usually isn’t). Sigh.
In the process I discovered that SELinux targeted policy interferes with my named configuration. One more thing to try to fix…
Weird – i’m getting the exact same problem. Rebooting doesn’t work for me though.
I haven’t had any recurrence of the problem since I posted this entry, so I don’t have any further insight into the problem. The only things I can think of to try would be disabling SELinux and iptables to see if they affect the problem. Please let me know if you find a solution.