Local DNS Stops Working After Kubuntu 14.04 Upgrade

The Case of the Disappearing Synology

So the wife informs me that she cannot access our Synology server. Normally that would not bother me but I happened to be on the other side of the country for business. Being the tech guy around the house has its annoyances but when you are 2600 km away for work it can be downright frustrating. Not one to get between the misses and her TV shows, I remoted in.

After having her verify that it was on, I began investigating. The machine normally shows up on the network as diskstation so I tried pinging it. There was no reply. Next I tried resolving the hostname. Nothing. That was really weird because before I left everything was working. External DNS seemed fine, it was just internal DNS that was not working.

Internal DNS is handled by our Asus wireless AP. Its IP address is 192.168.1.1 as it sits behind the telco’s ADSL “modem”. I connected to the Asus and verified that the diskstation was registered there as connected device. Next, I checked /etc/resolv.conf. It used to have the Asus’s IP but now it had local IP, 127.0.0.1. Since external DNS was resolving and the system was set to resolve via the localhost, that told me we are now running a DNS server on the machine. That struck me as very odd since I never set one up. There was no need to. I have a DNS server running on the Asus (and actually working).

swoogan@laptop:/etc/NetworkManager$ ps aux | grep dns
nobody    2366  0.0  0.0  38080  3540 ?        S    11:05   0:00 /usr/sbin/dnsmasq --no-resolv --keep-in-foreground --no-hosts --bind-interfaces --pid-file=/run/sendsigs.omit.d/network-manager.dnsmasq.pid --listen-address=127.0.1.1 --conf-file=/var/run/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.conf --cache-size=0 --proxy-dnssec --enable-dbus=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.dnsmasq --conf-dir=/etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d 

Apparently I am now running a dnsmasq server locally. Very interesting.

swoogan@laptop:~/$ cat /var/run/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.conf 
swoogan@laptop:~/$ 
swoogan@laptop:~/$ ls /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d
swoogan@laptop:~/$ 

Ok, how exactly is this the configured?

I began to suspect that since her machine uses wifi, and its networking is controlled by NetworkManager, that it was doing something. So I searched online about NetworkManager, dnsmasq and find out that there is another tool in the mix called resolvconf. I had never heard of this tool.

What is this? The Microsoft school of networking? Need 17 components, with 17 points of failure, to get something simple working?

So I continue down the rabbit’s hole:

swoogan@laptop:~$ ls /etc/resolvconf
interface-order  resolv.conf.d  update.d  update-libc.d
swoogan@laptop:~$ cd /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d
swoogan@laptop:/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d$ ls
base  head  original
swoogan@laptop:/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d$ cat base
swoogan@laptop:/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d$
swoogan@laptop:/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d$ cat head
# Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)
#     DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN
# Generated by NetworkManager
leha@laptop:/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d$ cat original
domain gateway.2wire.net
search gateway.2wire.net
nameserver 172.16.1.254

Well is that not interesting? That is the information that used to be in my /etc/resolv.conf before I bought the Asus modem. After the asus modem, dhcp changed it to 192.168.1.1. Where the heck did it get this from? And why now, several months later?

swoogan@laptop:/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d$ sudo mv original ~/
swoogan@laptop:/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d$ ls
base  head
swoogan@laptop:/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d$ echo "nameserver 192.168.1.1" | sudo tee tail
swoogan@laptop:/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d$ ls
base  head  tail
swoogan@laptop:/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d$ cat tail
nameserver 192.168.1.1

I just guessed at the name tail, given head and base. After that, the host diskstation was resolving. I do not know how or when this happened but it was after the upgrade to 14.04. The weird thing is that it was a while after the upgrade.