GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installation Basic Survival Wajig Audio AbiWord APM Backup Bash Booting Cameras CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Commercial Conference Management Configuration CRON CVS Databases DIA Directories Disks Documentation DVD Email Eye of Gnome Evolution File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks Fonts Ghemical GIMP Glade Gnome GnuCash Gnumeric GQView Graphics Groups HTML Editors ImageMagick Initialisations on Booting Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System OpenOffice.org Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Photos PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Security SH File System Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce SSH SUDO Subversion Swap Themes USB Video Virtualization Web Word X XML Sample Installations Troubleshooting Index

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/dhclient.conf by adding the two lines:

send host-name "athens.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.