I'm experiencing what appears to be a name resolution issue in Ubuntu 12.04 Server edition when configuring my computer to use static ip.

In /etc/network/interfaces:

# The primary network interface

auto eth0

iface eth0 inet static

address 192.168.1.28

netmask 255.255.255.0

gateway 192.168.1.1

Running $ sudo apt-get upgrade, results in a 'Failed to fetch...':

. . . W: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise-backports/universe/i18n/Translation-en_US Something wicked happened resolving 'us.archive.ubuntu.com:http' (-5 - No address associated with hostname)

[...]

When I change my /etc/network/interfaces to:

auto eth0

iface eth0 inet dhcp

Everything works fine.

Looking into /etc/resolv.conf provides some more hints.

In cases where I was getting the resolving issue, resolv.conf was empty; no nameservers were specified. Then I changed to DHCP from static and restarted networking; /etc/resolv.conf got changed to: 'nameserver 192.168.1.1'.

Switching back from DHCP to static and restarting doesn't remove the nameserver entry. But when I restarted the system with static set, resolv.conf was empty. When I restart the system with DHCP set, resolv.conf has nameserver 192.168.1.1. So, it appears that the issue is that resolve.conf is not getting written to correctly? Which package/code is responsible for writing to resolv.conf? Is there a particular package that I can take a look at open issues?

UPDATE:
istream posted a good article discussing changes to resolve.conf in 12.04.
http://www.stgraber.org/2012/02/24/dns-in-ubuntu-12-04/