Kemp’s Blog

A technical blog about technical things

Remove OpenDNS from Mint

It turns out that even though the Mint team make better decisions than the Ubuntu team, they’re not perfect. Hidden away in Mint’s network configuration are the OpenDNS servers set up as a fallback in case your usual DNS servers fail.

Unfortunately, this appears to be interacting oddly with Chrome resulting in the fallback servers being used for all requests. This has been causing all sorts of problems for me recently, most notably some very aggressive blocking of sites for no apparent reason (Stack Overflow being one example).

So, here’s how to remove the OpenDNS configuration and use something a bit more reliable (and ethical depending on who you ask).

  • Open up the configuration file:
    • sudo gedit /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/tail
  • Replace the existing nameserver IP addresses with more sensible ones, such as Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).
  • Update the configuration in /etc/resolv.conf:
    • sudo resolvconf -u

Job done. Enjoy the better service

Update:

Ross (@wilko_87) found that in his case the final command resulted in an error:

resolvconf: Error: /etc/resolv.conf isn't a symlink, not doing anything.

I’m not entirely sure how that came about, but the solution he found was to run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure resolvconf

which restored the symlink. It took a few minutes for things to start working correctly afterwards, but it didn’t require any special treatment.