Monthly Archives: February 2012

DNS in Ubuntu 12.04

Anyone who’s been using 12.04 over the past month or so may have noticed some pretty significant changes in the way we do DNS resolving in Ubuntu.

This is the result of the implementation of: foundations-p-dns-resolving

Here is a description of the two big changes that happened:

Switch to resolvconf for /etc/resolv.conf management

resolvconf is a set of script and hooks managing DNS resolution. The most notable difference for the user is that any change manually done to /etc/resolv.conf will be lost as it gets overwritten next time something triggers resolvconf. Instead, resolvconf uses DHCP client hooks, a Network Manager plugin and /etc/network/interfaces to generate a list of nameservers and domain to put in /etc/resolv.conf.

For more details, I’d highly encourage you to read resolvconf’s manpage but here are a few answers to common questions:

  • I use static IP configuration, where should I put my DNS configuration?
    The DNS configuration for a static interface should go as “dns-nameservers”, “dns-search” and “dns-domain” entries added to the interface in /etc/network/interfaces
  • How can I override resolvconf’s configuration or append some entries to it?
    Resolvconf has a /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/ directory that can contain “base”, “head”, “original” and “tail” files. All in resolv.conf format.
    • base: Used when no other data can be found
    • head: Used for the header of resolv.conf, can be used to ensure a DNS server is always the first one in the list
    • original: Just a backup of your resolv.conf at the time of resolvconf installation
    • tail: Any entry in tail is appended at the end of the resulting resolv.conf. In some cases, upgrading from a previous Ubuntu release, will make tail a symlink to original (when we think you manually modified resolv.conf in the past)
  • I really don’t want resolvconf, how can I disable it?
    I certainly wouldn’t recommend disabling resolvconf but you can do it by making /etc/resolv.conf a regular file instead of a symlink.
    Though please note that you may then be getting inconsistent /etc/resolv.conf when multiple software are fighting to change it.

This change affects all Ubuntu installs except for Ubuntu core.

Using dnsmasq as local resolver by default on desktop installations

That’s the second big change of this release. On a desktop install, your DNS server is going to be “127.0.0.1” which points to a NetworkManager-managed dnsmasq server.

This was done to better support split DNS for VPN users and to better handle DNS failures and fallbacks. This dnsmasq server isn’t a caching server for security reason to avoid risks related to local cache poisoning and users eavesdropping on other’s DNS queries on a multi-user system.

The big advantage is that if you connect to a VPN, instead of having all your DNS traffic be routed through the VPN like in the past, you’ll instead only send DNS queries related to the subnet and domains announced by that VPN. This is especially interesting for high latency VPN links where everything would be slowed down in the past.

As for dealing with DNS failures, dnsmasq often sends the DNS queries to more than one DNS servers (if you received multiple when establishing your connection) and will detect bogus/dead ones and simply ignore them until they start returning sensible information again. This is to compare against the libc’s way of doing DNS resolving where the state of the DNS servers can’t be saved (as it’s just a library) and so every single application has to go through the same, trying the first DNS, waiting for it to timeout, using the next one.

Now for the most common questions:

  • How to know what DNS servers I’m using (since I can’t just “cat /etc/resolv.conf”)?
    “nm-tool” can be used to get information about your existing connections in Network Manager. It’s roughly the same data you’d get in the GUI “connection information”.
    Alternatively, you can also read dnsmasq’s configuration from /run/nm-dns-dnsmasq.conf
  • I really don’t want a local resolver, how can I turn it off?
    To turn off dnsmasq in Network Manager, you need to edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and comment the “dns=dnsmasq” line (put a # in front of it) then do a “sudo restart network-manager”.

Bugs and feedback

Although we’ve been doing these changes more than a month ago and we’ve been looking pretty closely at bug reports, there may be some we haven’t found yet.

Issues related to resolvconf should be reported with:
ubuntu-bug resolvconf

Issues related to the dnsmasq configuration should be reported with:
ubuntu-bug network-manager

And finally, actual dnsmasq bugs and crashed should be reported with:
ubuntu-bug dnsmasq

In all cases, please try to include the following information:

  • How was your system installed (desktop, alternate, netinstall, …)?
  • Whether it’s a clean install or an upgrade?
  • Tarball of /etc/resolvconf and /run/resolvconf
  • Content of /run/nm-dns-dnsmasq.conf
  • Your /var/log/syslog
  • Your /etc/network/interfaces
  • And obviously a detailed description of your problem
Posted in Canonical voices, Planet Ubuntu | 243 Comments

Upcoming pastebinit 1.3 release

Every year, I try to set a few hours aside to work on one of my upstream projects, pastebinit.

This is one of these projects which mostly “just works” with quite a lot of users and quite a few of them sending merge proposals and fixes in bug reports.

I’m planning on uploading pastebinit 1.3 right before Feature Freeze, either on Wednesday or early Thursday, delaying the release as much as possible to get a few last translations in.

If you speak any language other than English, please go to:
https://translations.launchpad.net/pastebinit

Any help getting this as well translated as possible would be appreciated, for Ubuntu users, you’ll have to deal with it for the next 5 years, so it’s kind of important 🙂

Now the changes, they’re pretty minimal but still will make some people happy I’m sure:

  • Finally merged pbget/pbput/pbputs from Dustin Kirkland, these 3 tools let you securely push and retrieve files using a pastebin. It’s using a mix of base64, tar and gpg as well as some wget and parsing to retrieve the data.
    These are nice scripts to use with pastebinit, though please don’t send huge files to the pastebins, they really aren’t meant for that 😉
  • Removed stikked.com from the supported pastebins as it’s apparently dead.
  • Now the new pastebins:
  • paste.debian.net should now work fine with the ‘-f’ (format) option, thanks for their work on making their form pastebinit-friendly.
  • pastebinit should now load pastebin definition files properly from multiple locations.
    Starting with /usr/share/pastebin.d, then going through /etc/pastebin.d, /usr/local/etc/pastebin.d, ~/.pastebin.d and finally <wherever pastebinit is>/.pastebin.d
  • A few other minor improvements and fixes merged by Rolf Leggewie over the last year or so, thanks again for taking care of these!

Testing of the current trunk before release would also be greatly appreciate, you can get the code with: bzr branch lp:pastebinit

Bug reports are welcome at: https://launchpad.net/pastebinit/+filebug

Posted in Canonical voices, pastebinit, Planet Ubuntu | 4 Comments

Ever wanted an armhf container on your x86 machine? It’s now possible with LXC in Ubuntu Precise

It took a while to get some apt resolver bugs fixed, a few packages marked for multi-arch and some changes in the Ubuntu LXC template, but since yesterday, you can now run (using up to date Precise):

  • sudo apt-get install lxc qemu-user-static
  • sudo lxc-create -n armhf01 -t ubuntu — -a armhf -r precise
  • sudo lxc-start -n armhf01
  • Then login with root as both login and password

And enjoy an armhf system running on your good old x86 machine.

Now, obviously it’s pretty far from what you’d get on real ARM hardware.
It’s using qemu’s user space CPU emulation (qemu-user-static), so won’t be particularly fast, will likely use a lot of CPU and may give results pretty different from what you’d expect on real hardware.

Also, because of limitations in qemu-user-static, a few packages from the “host” architecture are installed in the container. These are mostly anything that requires the use of ptrace (upstart) or the use of netlink (mountall, iproute and isc-dhcp-client).
This is the bare minimum I needed to install to get the rest of the container to work using armhf binaries. I obviously didn’t test everything and I’m sure quite a few other packages will fail in such environment.

This feature should be used as an improvement on top of a regular armhf chroot using qemu-user-static and not as a replacement for actual ARM hardware (obviously), but it’s cool to have around and nice to show what LXC can do.

I confirmed it to work for armhf and armel, powerpc should also work, though it didn’t succeed to debootstrap when I tried it earlier today.

Enjoy!

Posted in Canonical voices, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 12 Comments