DNS in 12.04 (was: Re: mouse behavior <NOT SOLVED>)

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2012-05-14 at 17:38 -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
> I just re-installed clean, and all is well. But gnome screwed up my 
> network connect, which should have been dead easy out of the box as
> it's wired to a DHCP aware modem and worked fine during the install. I
> re-configured it to a static ip and static nameservers, and now it 
> works. My resolv.conf, which network-mangler is supposed to
> administer, pointed to 127.0.0.1 localhost. <giggles inanely> A newbie
> would have been in tears, swearing to curse Linux for the rest of
> their lives. I knew where to dig, so I'm just merely swearing. Someone
> just needs to shoot Network Manager and put it out of it's misery, as
> well as mine.

Your problem here is "too much knowledge" :-).  I don't know what the
original issue with your networking was, because you don't describe the
problem you had.

Having 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/resolv.conf is NOT broken: that is the
correct setting for the design of the DNS infrastructure in Ubuntu
12.04.

In Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu switched to using a local caching proxy DNS
server capability based on dnsmasq and using the resolvconf package.  In
order for this to work, your resolv.conf file MUST point to 127.0.0.1 so
that your local DNS proxy is being queried, not the upstream server.

Why the proxy was not working is a different problem, one that can only
be solved if you can describe the original issue you were having.
Personally I don't recommend leaving your system in the "broken" state
where you've forced /etc/resolv.conf, because that will likely break
again in the future with updates etc.


FYI, as someone who's struggled with network settings on laptops,
running _multiple_ VPNs with different private DNS domains on the same
system at the same time, etc. I'm very happy to see Ubuntu attempt to
make this work properly out of the box.  I've been deploying dnsmasq
with a hand-built configuration as a DNS proxy to deal with exactly the
same sets of problems for years now and it works GREAT (I don't use
resolvconf, though, as too many proprietary network tools don't work
with it).  Traditional UNIX resolv.conf is a weak, pathetic answer to a
complex problem.  It's hard to imagine that in a dynamic open source
environment in 2012 we still have to put up with such anemic solutions.


For more details see:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/foundations-p-dns-resolving
http://www.stgraber.org/2012/02/24/dns-in-ubuntu-12-04/