Hi misc'ers,
I have customised dhclient.conf so I can use nameservers other than my ISP's.
The first one on my list is unreliable, but instead of going to the next on the
list, ping, xxxterm and firefox are not finding the sites (ie DNS queries are
not being answered).
I am running Aug 14 -current, amd64.
The man page for resolv.conf says
"Up to MAXNS (currently 3) name servers may be listed, one per
line. If there are multiple servers, the resolver library
queries them in the order listed. If no nameserver entries
are present, the default is to use the name server on the
local machine. (The algorithm used is to try a name server,
and if the query times out, try the next, until out of name
servers, then repeat trying all name servers until a maximum
number of retries are performed.)"
But this is not what seems to happen.
---------------
My /etc/dhclient.conf:
# $OpenBSD: dhclient.conf,v 1.2 2011/04/04 11:14:52 krw Exp $
# DHCP Client Configuration
supersede domain-name-servers 208.71.35.137, 84.22.100.250, 67.212.90.199;
When I run dhclient, it generates this file in /etc/resolv.conf:
nameserver 208.71.35.137
nameserver 84.22.100.250
nameserver 67.212.90.199
---------------
The nameserver at 208.71.35.137 does not seem to be returning DNS queries with
the above resolv.conf configuration.
If I try to ping, I get:
# ping unsw.edu.au
ping: unknown host: unsw.edu.au
# ping ucla.edu
ping: unknown host: ucla.edu
Also xxxterm and firefox could not find web pages.
eg, xxxterm says:
"Unable to load page
Problem occurred while loading the URL
http://public-root.com/root-server-locations.htm
Cannot resolve hostname (public-root.com)"
(Although one time the page did load - presumably the 208.71.35.137 server came
online for a few seconds then back offline again).
-----------------
If I comment out the first line of the above resolv.conf, I get:
# ping unsw.edu.au
PING unsw.edu.au (149.171.96.60): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 149.171.96.60: icmp_seq=0 ttl=239 time=201.043 ms
...
--- unsw.edu.au ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 201.043/201.212/201.372/0.535 ms
# ping ucla.edu
PING ucla.edu (169.232.33.224): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 169.232.33.224: icmp_seq=0 ttl=48 time=48.711 ms
--- ucla.edu ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 48.711/48.711/48.711/0.000 ms
-----------------
This looks to me like if the first nameserver is not responding, the next on
the list is ignored.
I looked at the mailing lists and a bunch of man pages: dhclient.conf,
dhclient-script, gethostbyname, resolver, resolv.conf, and dhclient and could
not see a way to change this behaviour.
Am I misinterpreting what is happening when the pings are not finding the
hosts, or doing something wrong in my config?
Thanks,
Brett.
