VMWare Workstation 6 DNS Problems
I got hit with a weird bug when I upgraded to VMWare 6.0.3. Before, my Debian Linux guest could happily browse the Internet with a NAT interface. After, I could resolve both internal and external IP addresses, but could not resolve any domain names using DNS.
I can only guess at why, but I believe the problem was not the configuration of my guest, but rather that the problem lays in how VMWare deals with the DNS queries. I use DHCP to obtain an address from the built-in DHCP server, and I was being assigned a DNS server along with my IP (as verified by checking /etc/resolv.conf), but it wouldn’t resolve any names for me.
My solution for now is to step around the assigned DNS address given by the DHCP server, and choose another one instead. I opted to use OpenDNS’s servers, and configuring Debian to use them is trivial - just open /etc/resolv.conf as root with your favorite editor, and change the ‘nameserver’ line to use OpenDNS’s DNS servers. Mine looks like this:
domain localdomain
search localdomain
nameserver 208.67.222.222
Restarting the network isn’t even necessary, the next named request you make should be resolved successfully and everything should be peachy!
If you want to make the change more permanent, you can assign a static IP and a static nameserver to the active interface of your guest operating system (hint, /etc/network/interfaces), which will circumvent the DHCP server. If you want to keep using the DHCP server, you’ll have to change the nameserver line every time you request a new address.
Hope this helps someone else!
