We've started seeing this exception in our product in the wild after updating from 3.6.2 to 3.6.4 . It looks like validateCache doesn't always initialize the hostsCache.
Could have been this commit 5609998 ?
java.lang.NullPointerException: Attempt to invoke interface method 'java.lang.Object java.util.Map.get(java.lang.Object)' on a null object reference
at org.xbill.DNS.hosts.HostsFileParser.getAddressForHost(HostsFileParser.java:111)
at org.xbill.DNS.Lookup.lookupFromHostsFile(Lookup.java:649)
at org.xbill.DNS.Lookup.lookup(Lookup.java:586)
at org.xbill.DNS.Lookup.resolve(Lookup.java:675)
at org.xbill.DNS.Lookup.run(Lookup.java:697)
at ...