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How to Look Like a Dunce in One Easy Lesson

Posted by tuxchick on · 9 comments
LXer Linux News; By Carla Schroder 		Mail this story
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LXer Feature: 28-Apr-2011

Want to look like a dork with hardly any effort at all? Blame your Telco for losing Internet connectivity when it's your own fault.

Well there I was working away as usual, writing fabulous how-tos and Internetting for all I was worth, when suddenly I had no Internet. It's not unusual to have brief outages on my quaint little old 768k DSL, but when thirty minutes went by and I was still offline I got bugged.

And so I performed the usual rituals-- power cycle DSL modem, ping this and that, to no avail. My little homegrown Linux + PC Engines WRAP board router was not picking up its DHCP lease from my ISP. It never should have lost it, so this was mighty puzzling. I spent some time on the phone with a pleasant and equally puzzled tech support staffer. He thought Linux was cool, so we had something to talk about besides "I don't know why it isn't working either."

Then I got a little bit smart and connected a laptop directly, bypassing my router, and presto, Internet! And an annoying login screen in Firefox. Dear ISPs, you control the wires, so this is stupid and unnecessary. There is no Web browser on routers, geez. Then I got a little bit more smarter when I noticed the nameservers on the laptop were different than on the router. Oho, I says, this is a clue!

I'm sure you smart persons are thinking "Your configuration was wrong!" And you are right. Once upon a time I was paying five bucks extra per month for a static IP address. Then I decided I had better uses for those five dollars so I changed to a dynamic IP address. But I didn't change the configuration, so it was still configured for a static address, with nameservers in the config file. I'm guessing that when I first lost my connection they had changed their DNS servers. So after some more fussing and changing the external network interface to dynamic addressing, and wading through a few more idiotic login screens, everything works again.

Moral: Cruft bites.

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Comments (9)

cr ·
Now add that config to your backups.

In fact, better yet, script a periodic scp or wget of it to your master network-control workstation, wherever that is, and back it up from there. While you're thinking about it -- any other must-have configs? Same suggestion: copy from point-of-use to a good point-of-overview and back that up.

Also: you're more trusting than I if you don't have an alternate config each pointing at GoogleDNS and OpenDNS nameservers ready to go. If nameservers go down, bog down or slow down, so does your Internetting.

Our gateway/firewall box runs dnsmasq, with the rest of the network getting its DNS from that, so that's a one-place switch for us. That's also the one place we need to use a megabyte-size /etc/hosts file with, not only redirects for all the ad-farms and malware-sites, but the bogus-search page that OpenDNS offers instead of an honest 404.

[edit: had to help kid get ready for school, leaving thoughts posted but incomplete]
IGnatiusTFoobar ·
@cr

Just discovered dnsmasq a few months ago, and it's awesome. Really loving it.
jdixon ·
> ...if you don't have an alternate config each pointing at GoogleDNS and OpenDNS nameservers ready to go...

Google is offering a public DNS now? OK. Learn something new everyday. Many thanks. I already knew about (and use) Open DNS. I'll have to see how Google compares.
helios ·
We use Open DNS for our crappy AT&T installs since they are renowned for their DNS failures. Post back on any pros or cons to the Google offering.
Steven_Rosenber ·
I use the Google DNS. Works great. They're probably spying on me - that's the downside.
hkwint ·
Quoting:Google is offering a public DNS now?


If there's data to be mined, there's money to be made!
cr ·
Prior_Art: dnsmasq also allows us to run a split-horizon network (in Cosby's words, "You can see out, can't nobody see in"). The firewall's /etc/hosts file, and thus dnsmasq, has all the hostnames on our LAN's subdomain (no DHCP on the main segment -- everything's assigned and bogons stand out); we even have an MX for the mailserver.
cr ·
@helios: GoogleDNS seemed responsive enough while I was trying 'em out. I switched us back to OpenDNS because I already had a solution for their search-page substitutions and they're not in the business of data aggregation.
flufferbeer ·
@Steven_Rosenber, Why do you write "They're probably spying on me..."?? I thought that Google's current privacy policy includes storing non personally-identifiable logs, but EXCLUDES personal monitoring.

Although their current privacy policy will probably change once they get more and more people hooked into GoogleDNS and once they add more proprietary gotta have-it features.

-fb





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