In case you use Yahoo with Pidgin, you may sometimes find this error saying “Could not establish a connection with the server: Error resolving scs.msg.yahoo.com. Name or service not known”. Sometimes trying to connect multiple times may solve the issue, but sometimes it may never connect. Now this can get very irritating, so there is a fix for it. If you carefully look at the error, it says “Error resolving ..”. Now this is mostly some communication problem with the pager server scs.msg.yahoo.com. So the fix is like this :

Step 1: Open Pidgin, then go to Accounts -> Add/Edit (or just press Ctrl+A)

Step 2: Then select your Yahoo account and Click on Modify

Step 3: Then Go to Advanced

Step 4: Now under Pager Server, replace scs.msg.yahoo.com with 66.163.181.166 or 66.163.181.173.

This ip you get when you ping scs.msg.yahoo.com

$ ping scs.msg.yahoo.com
PING scs.msg.yahoo.com (66.163.181.166) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from cs101.msg.mud.yahoo.com (66.163.181.166): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=321 ms
64 bytes from cs101.msg.mud.yahoo.com (66.163.181.166): icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=320 ms
64 bytes from cs101.msg.mud.yahoo.com (66.163.181.166): icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=323 ms

Step 5: Now click on Save and and Enable Your yahoo account again, this time you hopefully should be able to connect. In case you still cant try the second, i have mentioned 2 IPs.

Note: Basically what you are doing is directly providing the IP address of scs.msg.yahoo.com thereby saving time and the need to resolve scs.msg.yahoo.com.

Update: If the above instruction doesn’t work with you, try to update your Pidgin version. You can check out getdeb.net or launchpad.net for the newest one.