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.