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I hope you are all well. Here's my problem.

I was running Ubuntu 10.04, and I got Mullvad , a VPN service because it is anonymous and cheap.

Mullvad VPN service installed perfectly on 10.04 and I used it for a couple of months without any issues.

In January I installed Ubuntu 12.04 via upgrade from 10.04, leaving Mullvad installed. Everything still worked properly.

Recently, however, with no changes to the software (as far as I know other than Ubuntu updates) Mullvad isn't working correctly. It says it's connected, but without the green checkmark indicating this which was previously displayed in 12.04 and 10.04. I could browse the Internet until about two days ago.

My subscription expired, and I started up Mullvad (but without the option to block connections on failure, because I was not a subscriber). I still left Mullvad installed, however. Later I restarted my computer, and this time did not start Mullvad/VPN at all. I could no longer access domain names, except for by typing in IP addresses of sites. I searched via startpage, and I found a couple articles. Apparently, I was supposed to move /etc/resolv.conf. EDIT: I followed the post here and did this: sudo mv /etc/resolv.conf /etc/backup.resolv.conf

I did this and now cannot access DNS. Thank you in advance.

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Anonymous
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1 Answers1

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Mullvad has futzed with /etc/resolv.conf. If I understand correctly you are no longer using Mullvad. Disable and/or de-install Mullvad. Then, to restore resolv.conf,

sudo dpkg-reconfigure resolvconf

and reboot.

Background: The Mullvad component /usr/share/mullvad/dnsconfig.py moves /etc/resolv.conf away to /etc/resolv.conf.pre-mullvad and writes a new /etc/resolv.conf. This presumably happens just after the VPN connection is established. To clean up, it moves /etc/resolv.conf.pre-mullvad back to /etc/resolv.conf. The problem with this is that in Ubuntu 12.04, /etc/resolv.conf is a symbolic link which should never be touched; programs like Mullvad should interface with resolvconf to update the resolv.conf file. If the machine is ever rebooted without Mullvad being stopped cleanly then the symbolic link is gone and /etc/resolv.conf is an obsolete file. Bad. To repair the damage (as I already said) run sudo dpkg-reconfigure resolvconf and reboot. To avoid recurrence, either don't run Mullvad, or contact the Mullvad developers and ask them to make Mullvad interface with resolvconf, or edit /usr/share/mullvad/dnsconfig.py yourself to do that.

jdthood
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  • Hi, Thank you for the advice. I did this and the terminal gave the following error: resolvconf:Error: /etc/resolv.conf isn't a symlink, not doing anything. Please help. – Anonymous Mar 22 '13 at 15:41
  • Thank you for the advice @jdthood. I followed your advice, and the terminal gave me an error: "resolvconf:Error:/etc/resolv.conf isn't a symlink, not doing anything." I think It has to do with what I did. I edited my question, because I had used the following code (which was missing from the original post): "sudo mv /etc/resolv.conf /etc/backup.resolv.conf" Thank you! – Anonymous Mar 22 '13 at 15:58
  • Do sudo ln -nsf ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf to restore the symlink directly. – jdthood Apr 03 '13 at 21:11