Question

How to permanently change DNS nameservers in Ubuntu 18.04.3? Wiki article is not working.

Hello,

I am trying to permanently change the DNS nameserver being using on my droplet.

I following this article: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-do-i-switch-my-dns-resolvers-away-from-google

But the permanent fix option is not working.

The file “/etc/network/interfaces.d/50-cloud-init.cfg” does not exist. And when I add nameservers to the file “/etc/network/interfaces” and restart the droplet, no change occurs. The file is saved, but the DNS server being used are still the default ones.

My “/etc/network/interfaces” file looks like the following:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*

dns-nameservers 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220

Am I missing something? I am new to Linux.

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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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• November 25, 2019
Accepted Answer

Hello,

With the older Ubuntu distributions, you could do that with the /etc/resolv.conf however, with Ubuntu 18.04 you should make the change in the netplan configs at /etc/netplan/*.yaml files.

The file would look something like this:

network:
    version: 2
    ethernets:
        eth0:
            addresses:
            - 123.123.123.123/20
            - 10.0.0.0/16
            gateway4: 123.123.123.1
            match:
                macaddress: cc:8c:11:e1:1b:81
            nameservers:
                addresses:
                - 8.8.8.8
                - 8.8.4.4
                search: []
            set-name: eth0

To change your nameservers, just update the addresses under the nameservers section. And then run:

sudo netplan apply

Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby

bunji cord • August 27, 2020

Just to point out for servers:

For persistence through reboots, you must create a file to stop cloudinit from resetting 50-cloud-init.yaml… (tested on ubuntu 20 server on DO today)

Copied from the default /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml : This file is generated from information provided by the datasource. Changes to it will not persist across an instance reboot. To disable cloud-init’s network configuration capabilities, write a file /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/99-disable-network-config.cfg with the following: network: {config: disabled}

*** Info: The actual addresses will be nameservers rather than redirects to resolvconf, so no 8.8.8.8 etc in the yaml file.