DNS settings on local machine not being pulled from DHCP server for local DNS resolution

I've opened a ticket under Ubuntu's bug tracker, but they've wondered if it might be something the virtualmin script is doing when it installs bind that's the issue, and breaking resolvconf

See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bind9/+bug/1045616

main problem is outbound dns lookups aren't working from server.

Status: 
Active

Comments

Howdy -- Virtualmin doesn't make changes to the BIND configuration during installation -- though it does set the /etc/resolv.conf to use BIND, rather than a remote server, for DNS resolution.

One thing we've noticed with Ubuntu 12.04 is that DNSSEC is enabled by default -- and it requires the system time to be correct in order for it to provide DNS resolution.

Can you verify with the "date" command that your system time is correct?

You can use this command to set your system time to Ubuntu's NTP server (even if DNS isn't working):

ntpdate 91.189.94.4

After running the above command, does DNS work for you?

I ran "date" and the time was correct.

I undid my temporary workaround which was manually editing
/etc/resolvconf/resolvconf.d/head

and adding the correct hostname line manually.

After commenting that line out with #, I rebooted the server.

Trying to ping out from ssh it is pinging now. The contents of my resolv.conf is:

# 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
# nameserver 4.2.2.2 4.2.2.3
nameserver 127.0.0.1
search xyz.com

---------------------

Going back to my original steps I did:
- Loaded Ubuntu 12.04
- Tried to install virtualmin
- couldn't resolve dns
- found a workaround by editing the /resolvconf.d/head file
- got virtualmin downloaded and installed
- Now I'm undoing the workaround
- ping still working with the same resolv.conf that was previously not working pre virtualmin

The only thing I can think of is that without bind installed (which is the default config for Base ubuntu install) DNS resolution was failing. Now with BIND in from virtualmin's install.sh it is working so I think we've just worked around the problem twice but not finding the source of the original problem. Let me push back on the original Ubuntu ticket referenced above since I don't think it's part of the virtualmin script now. The problem was pre-virtualmin :)

Thanks!