Im running Fedora Core as a server and i cant seem to get it to connect
to the internet with Mozilla. We have a T1 here at the office and we
run through a Netgear RT314 Gateway Router. under the network
properties its says i recognizes our ethernet device as ETH0. However
the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary DNS boxes are empty. is this the
cause of the problem and how do i get linux to detect these settings.
thanks in advance

JeffHanson7183@gmail.com wrote:
> Im running Fedora Core as a server and i cant seem to get it to connect
> to the internet with Mozilla. We have a T1 here at the office and we
> run through a Netgear RT314 Gateway Router. under the network
> properties its says i recognizes our ethernet device as ETH0. However
> the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary DNS boxes are empty. is this the
> cause of the problem and how do i get linux to detect these settings.
> thanks in advance
>

Not much info to go on as to what you want it to do, but I'll bite.

Can you ping any IP addresses on the Internet NOT using fqdn's from the
machine? e.g.

from an xterm window...

ping 66.102.11.104

(which is actually www.google.com so should be alive)

If you get something like this:
PING www.google.akadns.net (66.102.11.104) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 66.102.11.104: icmp_seq=0 ttl=244 time=48.1 ms
64 bytes from 66.102.11.104: icmp_seq=1 ttl=244 time=43.7 ms
..... ad infinitum

Then you have connectivity and a DNS problem. If however the ping
command stalls or gives messages like "no route to host", "unreachable"
etc. then you have a connectivity/routing problem. Check that your
default gateway setting is the IP address of the router.

Otherwise, unless you are using DHCP from somewhere else to get the
machine's IP information, (an insanely bad idea for a server) and did
not enter the DNS addresses when you installed Fedora, it cannot
"detect" them itself because it has no idea where to look or how you
want it to behave. Neither can dimwoes or anything else do so in this
scenario, so it's not a deficiency, just lack of critical information.

If you already have DNS servers on your local network you need to tell
the machine the search domain and ip addresses of the existing name
servers in /etc/resolv.conf - here's an example:

search my.domain.com # internal DNS name as used by current server
nameserver 192.168.1.1 # primary DNS for my domain
nameserver 192.168.1.2 # Optional (recommended) secondary DNS server

But, if you don't already have a DNS server and this machine is supposed
to provide client machines with local network DNS resolution as well as
whatever else, then it needs to be set up as a local DNS server and you
need to set up BIND, or named - not trivial. Look on TLDP.org for help
with this, or Google for DNS HOWTO. You will need to provide config
files containing at least basic IP info for the server itself, and you
may need to set it up to synchronise DNS with DHCP, (which will also
need configuring if you are going to use it for that too), all server
machines in your local zone, and also forwarder addresses to resolve
addresses in the big wide world. The addresses for the forwarders will
be provided by your Internet service provider.

When you have done all that, your /etc/resolv.conf should look something
like this:

search my.domain.com # your internal DNS name (arbitrary *)
nameserver 127.0.0.1 # this server is the master itself
nameserver 192.168.1.1 # secondary DNS for my domain
nameserver 192.168.1.2 # Optional tertiary DNS server

* whilst this is arbitrary, you also need to ensure it doesn't conflict
with anything "real" on the Internet, so best practice is to make it a
subdomain of your "real" domain name on the Net. i.e.

If your domain name is "myco.com"
make your internal domain "intranet.myco.com" or suchlike.


Good luck.