Re: resolv.conf wrongly gets Belkin router's address

[bob@proulx.com (Bob Proulx)]

Kent West wrote:
> > auto eth0
> > iface eth0 inet dhcp

That looks fine to me.

> That's the way it seems to me also, but when Belkin support told me that
> their router does NOT offer its own address as a DNS server, I figured I
> better double-check with other Debianistas before concluding that Belkin
> support doesn't know what they're talking about.

I have had really terrible experiences trying to get support for
commodity consumer hardware.  You have my sympathy.

> I don't find any such settings; here's a snapshot of the only relevant
> page on the Belkin setup that I can find: 
> http://www.acu.edu/~westk/belkin.jpg

That is what I expect to see but it does not explain why it is
offering itself as a DNS server.  To me this is confirmation of the
bug.

To continue debugging this I would capture a network trace of the dhcp
transaction using 'tcpdump' and then decode it using 'ethereal'.
Ethereal has a decode module for most packet types and is a great tool
for debugging anything network related.  I expect you would find
explicitly in the data packet the bad router address offerred as a dns
server.  But perhaps now.  Regardless it would be hard data.

I also see that 'dhcpdump' is packaged for Debian.  I found it just
now by searching the package database.  It looks interesting because
it is targeted and so perhaps "just the tool" for your problem.  I
have never used it but it looks useful.

  apt-cache show dhcpdump
  Description: Parse DHCP packets from tcpdump
   This package provides a tool for visualization of DHCP packets as
   recorded and output by tcpdump to analyze DHCP server responses.

> Ag! I'm so dense. I'm so accustomed to being a Debian-only house that I
> forgot my work laptop is dual-boot with Vista. I'll give that a shot.
> Thanks!

It is very pleasant to hear that you can forget entirely about those
other systems.  That is the way that it should be. :-)

Bob