Can't get out to web

tjulius · 04-18-2005, 05:41 PM

I'm pretty much a Linux newbie; I've got 30 years of software development, but have somehow avoided unixland. I've done some limited unix/linux stuff but not much configuration, and pretty much every little task requires opening a book.

I'm setting up a RedHat Enterprise Linux machine that will be a prototype server for a project. Right now I'm just trying to get it to be able to get out to the Internet and basically surf the web. There are other issues, but until I can download files, I can't address them.

The machine sits on a LAN watched over by an NT server. The LAN has a modem router (NetGear RP614) that does the gateway stuff et al.

From the Linux machine I can ping the router just fine, and I can ping an outside IP address, but I don't get any name resolution. I haven't figured out where to declare the DNS server addresses. So, I can ping 68.124.226.40 (for Yahoo) but I can't ask for yahoo.com directly. Therefore I'm assuming it's a DNS configuration issue.

I look up DNS in troubleshooting and this and other forums, but the first 10,000 articles always seem to be about how to make the machine a DNS server, which I'm not interested in. I just want to tell it "the gateway is here, and go there for your DNS". The gateway I think I did correctly, but how do I tell it what IP addresses I want it to use for DNS?

Thanks

kevinatkins · 04-18-2005, 05:57 PM

Hi,

Put the nameserver addresses in /etc/resolv.conf.

Pcghost · 04-18-2005, 06:11 PM

in this format

nameserver 198.6.1.140

tjulius · 04-18-2005, 06:56 PM

If that will do it (and it'd be great), how would I declare a secondary nameserver?

twantrd · 04-18-2005, 07:08 PM

You do the same thing to put a secondary nameserver in.

nameserver <ip address>
nameserver <ip address>

-twantrd

mcd · 04-18-2005, 07:55 PM

iirc resolv.conf get's overwritten when you restart your computer though right? how do you avoid that again?

tjulius · 04-18-2005, 08:45 PM

Now I can move onto the next problem!

Thanks again

twantrd · 04-18-2005, 09:22 PM

mcd,

resolv.conf does NOT get overwritten when you reboot.

-twantrd

mcd · 04-19-2005, 05:07 PM

Quote:

here's what was happening - when i edited /etc/resolv.conf to take out 192.168.0.1 as a nameserver i restarted my eth0 interface as i said in a couple postings (i thought that had to be done for the changes to take effect) however, when i did that SUSE queried for a new nameserver and IP address from the router so i lost my changes. I discovered that by looking at those tcpdump logs.

from this thread .

does it only happen with dhcp? only Suse? total BS?

twantrd · 04-19-2005, 07:10 PM

Ahh, then yes. Most likely under dhcp you will be querying for nameserver(s) and your resolv.conf will get overwritten. It's been a while sorry. I always pretty much set the ip's statically. But yes, dhcp will cause this.

-twantrd

mcd · 04-20-2005, 12:48 PM

aha! here's what i was thinking of!

Quote:

-R

Prevents dhcpcd from replacing existing /etc/resolv.conf file.

from the dhcpcd man pages. i love it when i'm not crazy, lol.

twantrd · 04-20-2005, 05:45 PM

Well, there you go

-twantrd