60.2 ADSL and DNS Debugging

In my setup Internet connections are sometimes apparently slow and sometimes fail DNS lookup. The problem turned out to be because the default /etc/resolv.conf used the ADSL Modem/Router as the DNS (and this file was updated automatically at around 9:30am each day to):

  search
  nameserver 192.168.0.1
  nameserver 0.0.0.0

Changing it back to:

  nameserver 203.0.178.191

fixes the DNS problems. The router seems to correctly identify the DNS itself (203.0.178.191) but somewhere things don’t work. This is overridden in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf by adding the two lines:

send host-name "athene.togaware.com";
supersede domain-name-servers 203.0.178.191;

Perhaps the router is smart enough to do local DNS with athens mapped appropriately? If so, then don’t need the static (but possibly changing) entries in /etc/hosts.


Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0