DNS configuration: How 2 change from local to remote nameservers
 

Hi all,

I am running Fedora Core 3 connected to the internet via an ADSL router (Brand: Sweex, router login webpage says Conexant - Hasbani). It is configured to provide "DNS Proxy", and for "Primary" and "Alternate" DNS nameservers I have entered IP numbers of two DNS servers at my ISP.

Up to now, I have supplied the IP number of the router as the primary nameserver on the DNS page of Network Setup in my Fedora system. However, the router's DNS proxy service generates frequent temporary errors messages ("domain cannot be resolved"), and crashes every few days requiring me to manually reboot the router. Hence, I would like to configure Fedora to use the nameservers of my ISP directly. I have tried entering the same ISP DNS server the router uses as the primary nameserver on the DNS page, then deactivating and reactivating the connection, but then DNS lookups don't work at all, and I have to restore the router IP. Obviously something else needs to be changed, but what?

TIA

take a look into /etc/resolv.conf

Thanks for the suggestion. Changed that as well but no go. Hmmm....

How did you change it? That's the file that keeps track of DNS server info for you. You want to change the IP addy of your modem to the IP of the DNS server you mean to point at, and then add a second identical line with the IP of the secondary DNS server you wish to use. All this info gets rewritten if you use DHCP and reboot.

To test if it's using the new DNS servers, do "dig yahoo.com" - towards the bottom of all that info you should see something similar to this:

;; Query time: 109 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1)
;; WHEN: Tue May 31 12:28:17 2005
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 229

"server" should be one of the entries you have in /etc/resolv.conf.