I'm sorry if this has been discussed elsewhere, feel free to point me to the right thread.

After upgrading OTA to PR1.2, I have noticed that my DNS resolution when connected with WiFi does not work anymore.

The default /etc/resolv.conf only lists 127.0.0.1 as a name server, and it seems no server responds on the device.

If I link /etc/resolv.conf to /var/run/resolv.conf.wlan0 it works fine, but it does not seem like a proper fix (and it might not work when trying to connect through the cell network).

Has anyone seen anything like this?

Thanks!

Hi,

I am running 1.2, have been for a week or so, and resolv.conf shows 127.0.0.1 but DNS lookups are fine, I believe it uses mDNS (process is dnsmasq on N900 I think) locally which forwards onto whatever your DHCP server has given you as a DNS server. If I nslookup to google it says the server used is 127.0.0.1.

Reason I post is I have just installed MeeGo on my Dell Mini 9 this afternoon and am experiencing the exact same issue as you as of about 3 hours ago. I've been messing around with it thinking the connmgr was messing it up but maybe not.... I to can make wifi DNS work by editing resolv.conf every time I connect.

Long shot but it may be related as MeeGo and Maemo are cousins and based on the timing of our problem!

Interestingly if I connect using the 3G sim in the netbook then 127.0.0.1 works fine.

Does 3G/GPRS work OK for you on your N900 using 127.0.0.1? Try an nslookup and see what server is used.

Jose

OK, worked out my problem, might help you....

I ran 'tcpdump -i eth1 -vvvn port 53'. Not sure if tcpdump is available on N900, but Wireshark is in the devel repo which you can capture packets with.

This showed that the local mDNS forwarder was trying to send to the DNS server handed out by my DHCP server. My problem was I have a permament LAN-LAN VPN to work and use the work DNS server for Windows Domain resolution reasons (very annoying!), however at this moment in time the VPN is down so I get no response.

This basically suggests to me that maybe your issue is a simple as you are not getting a response from your DNS server, a tcpdump/Wireshark trace would show if this is the case. But might be quickest to just check your router is OK and is configured to send a sensible DNS server out over DHCP. It will either hand out itself and forward onto your ISP, or it will hand out your ISP DNS servers directly.....if it all looks OK you could try forcing the router to hand out 8.8.8.8 (and 8.8.4.4 if it has a secondary option) - these are Google's public DNS servers and will always work as long as you have an internet connection.

Good luck.

Thanks for your detailed investigation!

It is an interesting problem, indeed, because it was working fine so I used the connection to upgrade to PR1.2 (the upgrade caught me in the middle of a cross-country move so I had to wait to find some connection I could use before upgrading) and after the installation and reboot it stopped working.

The weird thing is that if I use the servers given by DHCP directly in the resolv.conf file, things work so the servers are probably fine. I probably have to check what is going on with dnsmasq. Unfortunately, I can't try GPRS right now (I need to enable it on my prepaid plan and I want to wait until my life stabilizes!)

I will try to check what's going on (probably after I get all my stuff back from a moving company!) and I get my own Internet connection.

Thanks again! I'll post once I know something else.

You could try setting up an Opendns account and see if that helps, just for fun.

So this morning my MeeGo is exhibiting the same issue as you...
tcpdump on the lo (127.0.0.1) interface shows the app in question sending DNS to the mDNS app (I can't find dnsmasq in MeeGo rather annoyingly), but whatever app it is (maybe the kernel itself...) it's forwarding them on over eth1 (wlan1 in your case on N900). But I get no response, even though all other devices in the network clearly are.

Like you if I set the nameserver in resolv.conf directly all is good, i.e. missing out the mDNS app.

For now I have left resolv.conf as 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

I made a handy script to change the resolv.conf back to local, or google, or my home network by copying different resolv.conf.<name> to resolv.conf.

Should work the same on N900, make a script containing;
sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf.$1 /etc/resolv.conf

Then;
# chmod a+x dnsupdate

Put the script in /usr/bin/

Create various /etc/resolv.conf.<name> for commonly used networks and just pass them in when you run the script, e.g;
# dnsupdate google

Hope that eases the pain until a fix can be found. I still find it really odd that Meamo5 and MeeGo have done this in almost the same hour! Maybe it is just an coincidence!

Let me know how you get on. I will also post if I have any findings, but as I have wasted the best part of a day on this I'm gonna chill with my work around for a bit

Cheers.

Jose

Hi guys,

try to fix your IP and DNS, it solved the problem for me

ps: have anyone opened a bug for this ?

I assume by fix you mean assign a static IP? This works because you are setting the DNS manually which we know already works, my workaround is to allow DHCP to work for IP/DfGw but then overwrite the DNS.

I've not raised a bug yet, but will do if I don't find anything in the next couple of days when I have tried my MeeGo at work (i.e. a different wifi network).
Guess I'll raise one for each OS and cross reference them, though I am not yet convinced it is definitely a bug as I have traces showing the DNS requests going from the local mDNS app to the DNS server but with no response, plus it is present in 2 different OSes, plus surely someone else would have had this issue by now - it is fundamental to the internet working!

My only suspicion at the moment is these requests are somehow containing a reply address of 127.0.0.1 and so the DNS server response is being sent to the wrong address, but this doesn't really make any sense as the DNS server should always respond to the adjacent IPort or devices behind NAT would never be able to talk to a DNS server outside their own subnet.

I found the issue and a possible solution!

It turns out that dnsmasq was not starting because the "nobody" user was non-existant (how appropriate ;-)). Adding nobody to /etc/passwd made everything work fine again (so far, I haven't seen anything break yet because of that).

The other possible solution would be to run dnsmasq as another user ("user" maybe?), but that seems a bit more risky.

Does anybody know why nobody would have disappeared? Is it present in a flashed PR1.2 firmware? I wonder if it is there in the PR1.1.1 one (it never occurred to me to check that).

nobody exists on my PR1.2, it did a full flash including the eMMC content to upgrade. Maybe your users got garbaged on upgrade, or some app you have installed has been messing where it shouldn't?

Glad you got it working though, still no joy for my MeeGo