Everytime I boot my Fedora 8 box, the DNS has been changed. I used the GUI to change it to 192.168.1.1, which is the IP of my router. It will work fine until I reboot. It was putting a 200.x.x.x IP address in that field everytime I rebooted.

What is really strange is that my internet always worked, I just couldn't connect to my box using SSH or VNC until AFTER I changed the DNS. I found that the resolv.conf file was showing that old IP address, so I just manually changed it in the file. After I rebooted, it had moved my resolv.conf to resolv.conf.bak and created a new resolv.conf with the wrong DNS address again. Then I read somewhere to make the file readonly so it wouldn't get overwritten. I did that, but then it created a resolv.conf.tmp and was using that. What is the problem?? I just want it to save my DNS address.

OK, I'm having some problems with terminology here, so maybe you can help by explaining in more detail:

You say:
You say the DNS has been changed. DNS, as cached by bind, is deliberately volatile by design, but I don't think that is what you mean. I think you mean the IP address (the x.x.x.x numeric address) has changed.

If it is getting a 200.x.x.x, it is getting that from somewhere. Either you've got that in one of the config files (hosts) or it is getting it from somewhere else such as DHCP or PPP.

This is precisely the behaviour of PPP (and it may be what DHCP does, I haven't checked)... there is a system call to do exactly this (and rename it back afterwards), so other things that use the service may do this, too.

I think its most likely you are getting the 200.x.x.x (particularly if its only the the last x that varies and it only varies depending on the boot order of machines on your network) from DHCP. So you'd be running a dhcp daemon on this box and have something else on the network handing dhcp addresses out (router? a server?). Alternatively, if you are running PPP (pppd on your box) out to your ISP, that could do it.

Isn't PPP for dialup connections? How can I check if PPP is running?

PPP itself is for dialup connections. There is also PPPoE (PPP over ethernet) which is sometimes used with broadband and I suspect (never actually used it, but it sounds plausible) may do the same trick.

In general, to check what you've got running, something like

would do the trick. you'll probably get more than one screenful of information though, so you'd probably like


better (or, "just show the things which include the string 'pp' "). My preference is to 'grep' (filter) on a substring, if possible, because that makes the slightly annoying 'and you are also running a grep command that include the target string' line stand out more.

If you did want to see everything, you might redirect the output of the 'ps' command to less, so that you could page up and down through the output at your leisure.

A similar trick might be used to check whether you are running anything to do with dhcp, but you have to be a bit careful. Some of the things which have something to do with dhcp don't include dhcp in the name (avahi?? don't know if Fedora runs Avahi, but that's a 'multicast service discovery daemon, using dhcp').

I'm not sure what Fedora does for 'services' but I assume that it is something similar to SuSE. In this case, the distro has its own app for starting and stopping services and you can see what is going on from that. Alternatively, KDE has a submenu for the same thing. If you have installed Gnome and only Gnome, then System > Administration > Services does something similar, but, when I've checked (not on a Fedora box), it looked less detailed, so I don't know whether to trust it absolutely. Maybe, kde just runs more services!

Not sure what caused it, but I botched it up trying to tinker with things so I just reloaded (from the DVD this time instead of the live CD) and it is working perfectly. Thanks for your help anyways though!

I have had a similar problem. I installed from DVD onto an older machine, opting for DDNS because the network cable wasn't plugged in. Completed install and then tried to change to manual DNS, but after every reboot it reverted to DDNS and showed 169.254.0.0 as the active route.

After several attempts at restoring the DNS settings I gave up and did a fresh install on a more recent computer (brand new) and this time I nominated the manual DNS in the original setup.... same problem.

Does Fedora 8 support a fixed IP address???

Sorry, ignore this post. I thought I was replying to a different message.