Still fighting to get names to resolve in Ubuntu

[Tony Arnold]

Colin,

On Sun, 2005-10-02 at 12:10 +0100, Colin Murphy wrote:

> This has not previously been a problem because, being a refugee from Suse, I 
> always had my nameservers 'hard coded' in resolv.conf.  This does not seem to 
> be an acceptible way of working in Ubuntu because resolv.conf keeps being 
> overwritten to point at the router, 192.168.1.1.

You could try editing your /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf file. There is a
line in there which specifies what the dhcp client should request, and
it includes the name servers by default. I would try removing the name
server entries and then hard coding your name servers in resolv.conf.
I've not actually tried this myself, but this is where I would start, I
think.

I'm assuming you cannot configure your router to return more sensible
server addresses?

> I seem to be able to get some sort of name resolution working if I tinker, for 
> instance, if I do :
> 
>  # dig www.google.co.uk
> 
> I get an answer back for the IP address.  If I then enter this ip address into 
> a browser it will show up the google page. If I then enter the name 
> 'www.google.co.uk' into a browser, it will bring up the page, like it has 
> been cached somewhere.  Obviously links from the google page don't work

Does it not work at all, or does it just take a long time for your
browser to resolve the name?

I had a problem where it was taking a long time and pinned it down to
having search domains defined in resolv.conf. I removed these, and name
lookups became almost instant (you can remove the search domains from
the network configuration tool in Gnome).

I think what was happening, was the applications were appending the
whole of the search domain, letting the lookup fail, then adding part of
the search domain etc., etc., until all parts of the domain had been
used up.

HTH

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold