Question

11

Why did I have to remove resolvconf to get dnsmasq to work again?

rated 0 times [ 11] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 34186 / 3 Years ago, sun, may 2, 2021, 8:29:55

Yesterday I upgraded to Precise and dnsmasq stopped working. That is, DNS queries to localhost where dnsmasq is listening (127.0.0.1) were refused.

Removing resolvconf (apt-get remove resolvconf) and rebooting solved the issue (found that suggestion somewhere on Google). /etc/resolv.conf looked fine with and without resolvconf in place. No difference at all.

Why would I use resolvconf? Are there any benefits? The Wikipedia article covering resolvconf sucks.

Why did resolvconf interfere with dnsmasq? Is this a known issue?

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arkcker

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answered 3 Years ago corsee · Accepted Answer

The simple answer to (1) is: resolvconf sets itself up as the intermediary between programs that supply this information (such as ifup and ifdown, DHCP clients, the PPP daemon and local name servers) and programs that use this information (such as DNS caches and resolver libraries). As of Ubuntu 12.04 resolvconf is part of the default installation in both the server and desktop variants. It is never necessary to remove resolvconf and people who do remove it usually don't understand it, generally because they haven't read resolvconf(8) and /usr/share/doc/resolvconf/README.gz.

The answer to the second question is that resolvconf most probably did not interfere with dnsmasq. My guess is that you were running into bug #959037.

Explanation: In Ubuntu 12.04 there are two ways in which dnsmasq gets run. There is the traditional standalone version of dnsmasq which listens on all addresses. And there is the new NetworkManager-controlled dnsmasq process which listens only on 127.0.0.1. The latter conflicts with the former unless the former is reconfigured. This problem was solved in Ubuntu 12.10 by having the NM-controlled dnsmasq process listen on 127.0.1.1 instead of 127.0.0.1 and by forcing the standalone dnsmasq process to listen only on addresses assigned to interfaces.