missing /etc/resolv.conf symlink

[Samuel Parkinson]

I have just moved to Mint 13. I noticed on installing that my domain wasn't automatically being added to the end of paths - i.e I had to use tethys.ese.ic.ac.uk where I should just be able to use tethys.

The reason for this was that /var/run/resolvconf/resolv.conf was not being generated. I noticed that /sbin/resolvconf has a line in with

[ -L /etc/resolv.conf ] || { report_err "/etc/resolv.conf isn't a symlink, not doing anything."; exit 0; }

and also noticed that other Ubuntu Precise workstations in the department have a symlink to resolv.conf in /etc/ where I did not. Adding this symlink and restarting resolvconf resolved the problem

[Steve O (stratus-ss)]

I can confirm this on 3 seperate installs. I was actually about to report this myself.
I however, did a "dpkg-reconfigure resolvconf " and that resolved my issues.

[Danial Pearce (tigris666)]

Also confirming this "bug". I resolved my issues by running `dpkg-reconfigure resolvconf` and choosing YES to the option to create a symlink.

FWIW, I needed to do this for VirtualBox to work with NAT networking properly, since it relies on reading the DNS entries from /etc/resolv.conf so it can pass them onto the guest OS. I'm unsure at this point if it's a "bug" in VirtualBox to rely on that file, or a bug in Mint to not create that file on install, or a bug in resolvconf to continue working without that file.

[Roger Preece (rwpreece)]

Found this article, that provides a pretty good description of the problem, while we were researching this DNS issue:

http://lincgeek.org/blog/?p=1529

[Danial Pearce (tigris666)]

That article is a bit misleading. He assumes it's an ubuntu issue which it is not, only Mint is missing the symlink. He also assumes dnsmasq caused the problem, which it did not, so disabling it all together and going back to managing resolv.conf manually is massive overkill.

[michaelcole (8-launchpad-michaelcole-com)]

The virtualbox bug in #2 took up alot of my time. Please fix this for future generations!

[Thomas Hood (jdthood)]

I downloaded linuxmint-13-mate-dvd-32bit.iso and extracted filesystem.squashfs, mounted this at mtpt and observe that in mtpt/etc/ there is nothing named 'resolv.conf' whereas there should be a symbolic link there named 'resolv.conf' pointing to '../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf'.

$ md5sum linuxmint-13-mate-dvd-32bit.iso
43ca0be4501b9d1a46fea25ec2cd556e linuxmint-13-mate-dvd-32bit.iso

[Lisa Simpson (lisa-p)]

I'm having EXACTLY the same problem on Precise Pangolin

[Thomas Hood (jdthood)]

@Lisa: It's not exactly the same problem because the standard Precise images don't lack the resolv.conf symlink.

If you are not using a standard Ubuntu Precise image then please mention this in your reply to my question in bug #1000244 (comment #68).

[Thomas Hood (jdthood)]

I have a report that suggests that this bug is fixed in Mint 14.

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/resolvconf/+bug/1000244/comments/96

[cebe (mail-cebe)]

I also had this problem on a fresh install of LMDE 201303

This has also been reported here:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=688670#p688670

I had already an existing /etc/resolv.conf file, not sure how it got there. Removing it and reconnecting did not update it so I created the symlink to /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf manually.