network-manager (pptp?) DNS doesn't work

Ping doesn't use network-manager to help it resolve host names. It uses the system libraries which use
nsswitch. What is the entry for "hosts:" in your /etc/nsswitch.conf?

Thanks for your reply. It is:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

I haven't modified this file since installation FWIW.

Hi Arthur
do you still experience this issue with the current version of the application?, could you please try to reproduce this using the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Hardy Heron.

Thanks in advance

I upgraded an installation of Gutsy to Hardy and tried this again. It does not use the peer DNS at all from what I can tell.

I have the "Use Peer DNS" checked under the PPP Options tab of the VPN configuration. Also, on the Routing tab, "Peer DNS through tunnel" is checked. I can see that it added the nameserver from my work domain to /etc/resolv.conf as the second nameserver listed (the nameserver from my router is listed first). However, no matter how I try to specify network resources (short computer names or fully qualified with the Windows domain name), dig doesn't produce any valid lookups. I definitely can ping the resources by IP so I know the tunnel is working.

It seems that as long as that first nameserver is listed in resolv.conf, it always gets used, and of course has no knowledge of my work's domain. Should it not remove my router's nameserver when I connect the tunnel, or is there an option to have it do this?

I tried commenting out the first nameserver. This indeed does force the lookups to the nameserver over the tunnel. I get responses as long as I fully-qualify the names of the resouces (e.g. computer.domain.local).

Change the hosts line to read:

hosts: files dns wins mdns4_minimal mdns4

This won't fix the duplicate entry in resolv.conf, but it will get DNS to resolve properly through the VPN.

Sorry, wins isn't necessary (I added that for my corporate network in which wins simplifies things quite a bit), and technically the mdns4 and mdns4_minimal shouldn't be necessary, but I'm not sure how they're being used by the system.

Thanks, that did the trick. That should probably be the default setting for /etc/nsswitch.conf.

Actually, the problem is probably stemming from your network having a domain suffix of ".local" - Avahi (and Bonjour) use .local internally, and that's probably what's causing it to fail to resolve properly. There's no simple solution, but I'm almost positive that this is the intended behavior. Since I'm not very well versed in the internals of Avahi I definitely wouldn't be the one to ask about this, but if anyone else has any insight as to a possible solution or at least a "more sane" default (seeing as there are a lot of users with .local domains, (generally Windows domains)) it would be very welcome.

In either case, the bug isn't being caused by network-manager-pptp or network-manager itself, but instead this bug should probably be moved to either base-files or one of the Avahi packages.

Correction: I had forgotten about the original issue with the duplicate entries in resolv.conf. That probably IS a bug in network-manager-pptp.

I'm not sure to which package that .local issue should be moved. How would we find out?

I would think to move the bug to "avahi" if you're referring specifically to the issue with .local domains, however, I wouldn't expect this to be fixed upstream as it's more than likely the intended behavior. However, I would file a separate bug report under base-files suggesting more "sane" defaults for nsswitch.conf. This is, of course, assuming that the workaround doesn't cause more problems than it cures. Does anyone with knowledge of avahi's internals have any input?

fixed in intrepid.