Accidentally removed resolvconf package. How to get it back?

March 18, 2016 12.2k views
DNS System Tools Networking Ubuntu
ihor.vorotnov
By:
ihor.vorotnov

It's always a bad idea to do smth before you have your morning coffee. Anyway, it already happened. Was configuring postfix to send emails via Google Apps, there was an issue with resolving domain names and no pings from the droplet. While reading some StackOveflow questions found an advice to reinstall resolvconf, but went into the process without reading the comments (dumb me, yes).

Package was purged, and reinstall isn't possible as apt-get can't resolve sources anymore. Restarted the server. Downloaded package directly via

wget http://91.189.91.13/ubuntu/pool/main/r/resolvconf/resolvconf_1.69ubuntu1_all.deb

and tried to install it 

dpkg -i resolvconf_1.69ubuntu1_all.deb

Rebooted the server, but no changes. Running apt-get update fails to fecth sources:

...
W: Failed to fetch http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/ubuntu/dists/trusty-backports/Release.gpg  Could not resolve 'mirrors.digitalocean.com'
...

OS: Ubuntu 14.04 x32
Any ideas?

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1 Answer
ryanpq MOD March 18, 2016

Installing the package manually may have worked here. We are currently experiencing an issue that is causing problems reaching the Google public DNS servers configured by default on droplets.

While our team continues to work to resolve the issue, you can fix this on an individual droplet by updating the DNS servers it uses.

On Ubuntu, you can change the DNS servers temporarily by editing your /etc/resolv.conf file but this change will be overwritten the next time the droplet is rebooted.

For a permanent change, you can edit the /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/base file to include:

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

example using the OpenDNS.org servers.

Once you've made the changes you can update resolvconf by running

sudo resolvconf -u
Reply
  • ihor.vorotnov March 18, 2016

    Yes, it actually kinda worked. I've edited /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/tail and added

    nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

    Then /etc/init.d/resolvconf restart. It works now.

    Any difference between /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/tail and /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/base? As I understand, that's the same, just appends these records in different order. Am I correct?

    • ryanpq MOD March 18, 2016

      That's correct. With head base being the primary default configuration and head and tail being prepended and appended to whatever is configured. By placing the changes in tail, you may see slightly longer resolve times as any servers elsewhere in the configuration would be queried first.

  • ihor.vorotnov March 18, 2016

    It's working now. Thanks for help!

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