hi, folks.

this is a puzzle; it's something that has happened occasionally for years 
but now has become frequent enough to be an annoyance, and i do not know 
enough about the mechanisms involved even to begin to troubleshoot it.

here's what happens: i am going merrily along and doing my work when i send 
an email message or go to a webpage and get errors that the host could not 
be found -- the usual dns error. when this happens i use the handy system 
settings network configurator and invariably discover that all the 
nameservers that i have listed are now gone. i presume that this 
application writes to /erc/resolv.conf (which is now a link to a 
resolv.conf someplace else, in /run/resolv.conf, which is heaven knows 
where but i suppose is one of those virtualized filesystems the boys are 
so proud of).

anyway, i usually keep three domain nameservers there, just in case one 
goes down. something is causing them to disappear.

i haven't fiddled with this stuff since resolv.conf was hard-coded such 
that you'd su root, edit /etc/resolv.conf, save the file, and be happy 
evermore. but now the file says not to edit it because it will be 
overwritten anyway.

so. any guesses as to what might be making my list of nameservers 
disappear? that failing, any good recipe for troubleshooting it to see who 
is eating my nameservers? and if not that, is there anyplace i can put 
them so that they won't get overwritten?

thanks very much and merry christmas, everybody!
-- 
dep

The shortest distance between you and playing great acoustic guitar:
the great new instructional DVDs from Marjorie Thompson, 
available at www.MarjorieThompson.com