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I just installed a new Ubuntu Server 18.04. I set my hostname hostnamectl set-hostname ****.openbayou.biz and I set /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 localhost
[ip address] ****.openbayou.biz hostname
# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
[ip6 address] *****.openbayou.biz hostname
::1     localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

I also installed OSSEC to monitor for new files, errors and changes to my server and I'm now getting these alerts:

Server returned error NXDOMAIN, mitigating potential DNS violation DVE-2018- 
0001, retrying transaction with reduced feature level UDP.`

It's now repeating itself:

systemd-resolved[3195]: message repeated 4 times: [ Server returned error 
NXDOMAIN, mitigating potential DNS violation DVE-2018-0001, retrying transaction 
with reduced feature level UDP.]

I've looked online for a solution and nobody is reporting this issue.

200_success
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Gregory Schultz
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  • Are you behind a captive portal? – dobey Jul 23 '18 at 18:56
  • No, this is a Linode 4GB server – Gregory Schultz Jul 23 '18 at 19:27
  • If you comment out the two lines you added, does it make a difference? I don't think the errors are about your /etc/hosts. They are happening because of the infrastructure the server is behind is likely doing something wrong. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/8608 seems to be the issue you're having, and was the first search result for "DVE-2018-0001." I don't think you're going to get a satisfactory answer until the upstream issue is fixed and released. – dobey Jul 23 '18 at 19:27
  • I got this error when my country blocked torrents – haytham-med haytham Mar 29 '20 at 21:42

11 Answers11

81

This warning is logged by systemd-resolved, whenever a name can not be resolved by the DNS system (e.g. nslookup www.kjfoiqaefah34876asdf.com). This can be tolerated and is no reason to be alarmed. This is no error and nothing needs to be fixed.

Redirecting /etc/resolv.conf to /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf is wrong, because this way systemd-resolved is skipped and the application with the faulty DNS request talks directly to the name server and not to the systemd-resolved stub anymore. This way systemd-resolved does not notice the NXDOMAIN events any more and therefore cannot log it any more.

The NXDOMAIN events are caused by packages, which try to access non-existing servers during system startup.

Zanna
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Hermann Klein
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    Is there any way to discover what the unresolved names are? – OrangeDog Jan 02 '19 at 10:53
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    @OrangeDog tcpdump -vv port 53 | grep NXDomain – bain Jul 17 '19 at 16:20
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    So there is no existing log of the application or domain that caused the log message? – lucidbrot May 08 '20 at 17:34
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    tcpdump is not very convenient at boot time... – MarcH May 14 '20 at 01:16
  • Unless you actually have a problem this error is harmless. It means you searched for a domain name (like a web site name) that didn't exist. It is telling you that it is using a workaround to make sure that the domain really doesn't exit.

    More of these errors need to be tagged "This error is harmless" meaning it's only for info in case you are actually looking at something that went wrong.

    The other option is to just tag it "INFO:"

     – Robert Wm Ruedisueli Feb 04 '21 at 05:54
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    I don't see what's wrong with bypassing systemd-resolved by symlinking /etc/resolv.conf. Nobody asked for systemd-resolved to be created in the first place, let alone made nearly impossible to disable, like some piece of malware. DNS works just fine without it. – Throw Away Account Feb 23 '21 at 22:21
55

IMPORTANT: The solution posted here hides the problematic message by bypassing an important part of your system (the DNS resolver daemon). It may cause DNS malfunction in the future (example). For a proper way to handle the error message please refer to this answer.

Server returned error NXDOMAIN, mitigating potential DNS violation DVE-2018- 
0001, retrying transaction with reduced feature level UDP.

The same error happened to my desktop machine, I don't know if it applies to server too.

It seems that my system had the old config in the place, resulting in a conflict between two services: resolvconf and systemd-resolved.

The symlink /etc/resolv.conf pointed to ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf

Changing it to point to /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf which is managed by systemd, fixed it for me.

Read more here on Ubuntu Forums

Hope that helped.

Zanna
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Panagiotis Tabakis
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    Mine is pointing to /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf on an Ubuntu 18.10 instance. – datashaman Nov 11 '18 at 06:14
  • Forgot to mention my system. Latest KDE Neon, (Ubuntu based), 18.04.1, 4.15.0-39-generic. – Panagiotis Tabakis Nov 18 '18 at 12:38
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    @datashaman It was the same case for me but changing the symlink to point /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf from /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf fixed the issue for me. I no longer see that error. – Karthic Raghupathi Dec 01 '18 at 22:21
  • Same worked for me. I'm on 18.10, but migrated from 18.04. Changing the /etc/resolv.conf -> /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf did the trick. – Igor Kupczyński Jan 09 '19 at 12:44
  • @PanagiotisTabakis any chance you could edit the answer with the command required to change the symlink? – Dennis May 06 '19 at 11:17
  • @Dennis generally, to change the target of a symlink, you use ln -fs /path/to/file2 /path/to/symlink. In my case it was ln -fs /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf – Panagiotis Tabakis May 07 '19 at 17:30
  • This error can be returned if systemd-resolved has no forwarders set. – F1Linux Oct 09 '19 at 08:22
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    This is the wrong thing to do. This does not fix anything but actually breaks how the resolver is supposed to work. The error message goes away because the systemd resolver gets bypassed. See the answer of Hermann Klein below. – Markku Kero Oct 24 '19 at 03:46
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    I tested this. As a practical drawback, this broke DNS resolution when using a VPN. – Eero Aaltonen May 06 '20 at 16:53
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    Mine was pointing to /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf on an Ubuntu 20.04. relinked to Mine is pointing to /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf restart and works – Brad Thompson May 17 '20 at 18:31
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    Changing an important system-level file like this is a bad idea and will only cause pain further down the line. – Stefan Lasiewski Oct 03 '20 at 01:32
15

I asked on the OSSEC GitHub about this error and they recommended writing a rule to ignore NXDOMAIN errors. Add to /var/ossec/rules/local_rules.xml

<rule id="234567" level="0">
 <program_name>systemd-resolved</program_name>
 <match>Server returned error NXDOMAIN</match>
 <description>Usless systemd-resolvd log message</description>
</rule>
Chai T. Rex
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Gregory Schultz
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    do you mind adding the link to the recommendation in your answer? It would be useful for others having the same issue. thanks! – Leo Gallego Aug 10 '18 at 03:03
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    https://github.com/ossec/ossec-hids/issues/1479 – Gregory Schultz Aug 11 '18 at 10:16
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    not work in ubunto 18.04 – acgbox Mar 26 '19 at 16:38
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    does not work in ubuntu 20.04 either – Jea Feb 20 '21 at 09:15
  • Note for readers who want to say that this answer does not work: The question was about a message also caught in OSSEC, a software that is not installed by default in Ubuntu. This answer says, that one may ignore the message with a rule in OSSEC. If you look at journalctl or other logs the message will still be there. – LiveWireBT Mar 12 '21 at 10:18
14

Problem

Although there might be other circumstances where this error will occur, I can definitely say that I've seen it puked in the output of:

systemctl status systemd-resolved

...when systemd-resolved is not configured.

And an Azure Ubuntu 18.04 VM does not have systemd-resolved configured out-of-the-box (as of today, 20191008).

Solution:

Configure systemd-resolved.

Mini systemd-resolved Config HowTo:

NOTE: Following instructions were prepared using Ubuntu 18.04

Edit hosts directive in /etc/nsswitch.conf by prepending resolve which sets systemd-resolved as first source of DNS resolution that will be consulted:

hosts:          resolve files dns

Edit /etc/systemd/resolved.conf. Some suggested settings:

[Resolve]
DNS=8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4
#FallbackDNS=
#Domains=
#LLMNR=no
#MulticastDNS=no
#DNSSEC=no
Cache=yes
DNSStubListener=yes

Restart systemd-resolved:

sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved

When you next check systemd-resolved's status, the error should now be cleared:

systemctl status systemd-resolved

And DNS resolution should now behave in the expected way.

F1Linux
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  • +1, IMHO good answer. Instead of suppressing/ignoring seems to address the root cause for machines where systemd-resolved is not configured. Thank you. – LMSingh Apr 17 '22 at 02:30
  • At least for my system, I now have more detail on the root cause.. (it might help others). As per man page for systemd-resolved (https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man8/systemd-resolved.service.8.html) read the section starting with "The DNS servers contacted are determined from ... ...". Because I was not using DHCP provided DNS (and all other DNS resolution options listed in the man page also were not available), there was no other way for a name to get resolved. Setting the DNS value in [Resolve] section allows the service to use that for resolution. – LMSingh Apr 17 '22 at 02:41
12

I noticed the same thing on an Ubuntu 18.04 server which was recently updated to 18.04.1.

It would appear that systemd-resolve logs that message whenever it gets any NXDOMAIN response. In my case I have postfix running. So I get a lot of NXDOMAINS when random servers connect that don't have PTR record set.

You can test it with

systemd-resolve securelogin.example.com

Then you should see the log message appear.

With this in mind it would appear to be a relatively innocuous error and you can ignore it.

abu_bua
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Rwky
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  • Added PTR record and haven't gotten a notice (so far). Thanks! – Gregory Schultz Jul 26 '18 at 01:09
  • Nope. Still getting them. Think next stage is to get OSSEC to ignore them. Would it be something related to Cloudflare as it's going through their systems and not being bypassed? Also, I see that OSSEC has an update (on 2.9.4, update to 3.0.0). Will update and see what happens. – Gregory Schultz Jul 26 '18 at 21:29
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    It's just part of how systemd works. If systemd-resolve tries to resolve a domain that doesn't resolve it logs that message. – Rwky Jul 27 '18 at 22:07
  • Ugh... what's good the error message when it doesn't contain information about which process tried to request the domain nor the domain name that was about to be resolved? – Mikko Rantalainen Jul 03 '20 at 08:57
9

My understanding after having read the previous answers and other web pages such as Ubuntu 18.04 systemd-resolved error NXDOMAIN is that this is more a warning than an error and there is nothing I can do on my side about it.

Therefore, I agree with those who say that we should not try to do something on our side so that these messages are not produced anymore. If we succeed, it is likely that we have altered the normal way the system resolve DNS requests.

However, since I have thousands of them (I am also in a desktop - it's not a server), I don't want them in my syslog file. Therefore, following https://www.rsyslog.com/doc/v8-stable/configuration/filters.html and Number pair prefix to config files, I added a file named 10-resolv.conf with a single line :msg, contains, "Server returned error NXDOMAIN, mitigating potential DNS violation DVE-2018-0001, retrying transaction with reduced feature level UDP" ~ in the directory /etc/rsyslog.d .

The name 10-resolv.conf is not important, but it must precede all other file names in the directory in alphabetic order. The command :msg, contains, <message-part> ~ says that all messages that contains <message-part> must be ignored: the tilde ~ in the command says to drop the message.

Note added: Since I wrote this answer, I installed some packages (for other reasons) and the error message is not produced anymore as checked with journalctl -u systemd-resolved -f. One installed package that might explain the disappearance of this message is libnss-resolve.

Dominic108
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2

Summary:

NXDOMAIN error message means that a domain does not exist.

Some ISPs started DNS hijacking or DNS redirection for NXDOMAIN error messages. It is the practice of redirecting the resolution of Domain Name System (DNS) names to other DNS servers or web servers.

Commonly used for displaying advertisements or collecting statistics.

This practice violates the RFC standard for DNS (NXDOMAIN) responses.

Phishing: Cross-site scripting attacks can occur due to malicious hijacking.

Censorship: DNS service providers to block access to selected domains.

Shown up here: https://www.dnsknowledge.com/whatis/nxdomain-non-existent-domain-2/

NIMISHAN
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Guest
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2

Apparently it doesn't link to 127.0.0.53 anymore, but I had no issues with it since re-linking.

I think there is a bug report out on this one. Anyway, it worked very well after re-linking.

Steps:

# systemctl status systemd-resolved

unlink /etc/resolv.conf


ln -s /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf


systemctl restart systemd-resolved


systemctl status systemd-resolved
intosomethin
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    Never thought I had to write the following on this forum, but apparently "yes": The "#" is the root's prompt. As a normal user, you would need "sudo" on all non-"status" commands. – intosomethin Apr 19 '20 at 23:52
  • Could you please add some more explanation about why Herrman Klein is wrong here? As somebody with little previous knowledge on this topic, right now there are just three disagreeing answers, two with many votes and one which is newer. How or Why is Panagiotis not bypassing systemd. Why especially not if it was linked to stub-resolv.conf ? – lucidbrot May 08 '20 at 17:39
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    It is bypassing systemd, because the requests are not sent anymore to 127.0.0.53, which is the systemd resolver. (Notice the difference between the nameserver lines.) – Jocelyn Sep 01 '20 at 06:08
  • @Jocelyn: This I haven't checked. I amend my reply. – intosomethin Nov 13 '20 at 22:38
0

I was able to get rid of the message, and by the way I was also able to finally connect to my samba server, by changing the server name to server.domain instead of only server.

rosch
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0

In my case Google Cloud dislikes CloudFlare DNS. After running the following command from bain above

sudo tcpdump -vv port 53 | grep NXDomain

When I open my domain in a browser I get:

dns.google.domain > ....: [udp sum ok] .... NXDomain q: PTR? ... ns: .... SOA ....cloudflare.com. dns.cloudflare.com. ....

Might be the case with other VPS-CDN providers as well.

Moving DNS to your VPS/Cloud provider can help.

Szektor
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This appears related to EDNS. The difference between using stub-resolv.conf and resolv.conf is options edns0.

Extension mechanisms for DNS (EDNS) is a specification for expanding the size of several parameters of the Domain Name System (DNS) protocol which had size restrictions that the Internet engineering community deemed too limited for increasing functionality of the protocol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_mechanisms_for_DNS

More details under this issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1766969

It sounds like, you can simply turn off that "option".

Carson Reinke
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    edns0 is needed by some client applications, for exemple for ensuring the response is validated by DNSSEC. It was added to systemd for this reason in this commit: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/93158c77bc69fde7cf5cff733617631c1e566fe8 – Jocelyn Sep 01 '20 at 06:03