impossible to connect to DNS

[Alexandru Cabuz]

Hello,

I have been using Debian testing on my laptop for a while now, and networking-wise everything went smooth until today it all of a sudden refused to connect to the DNS server and therefore refused to connect to anything else unless provided with the IP address.

For example, I can set up IP adresses with the corresponding names in /etc/hosts and it connects just fine (this is what I did for ftp.fr.debian.org) but it for some reason cannot connect to the dns server. The server itself is fine because all the other machines on my LAN use it no problem.

When trying to probe with nslookup it gave this error:

nslookup: undefined symbol: isc_net_pton

I therefore thought I got hacked, also keeping in mind the fact that I have not done a dist-upgrade for about two months because it kept trying to wipe lyx and I absolutely needed lyx. So maybe there was some security bug that got fixed but that I was exposed to because I didn't upgrade.

So I did

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

this took a while because there were about 300 packages to install or upgrade. Then

apt-get clean
apt-get install --reinstall [all packages on which nslookup depends, meaning all the libraries it links to]

There's maybe about 9 of them, the most notable of which is libc6.

But the same thing happens. No DNS, except now I don't get the weird undefined symbol error anymore. ping just gives unknown host unless you give it an IP address

Anybody have any idea what could be wrong?

I have also tried purging and reinstalling the resolvconf package. No change.


--
Alexandru Cabuz
Doctoral Student
Université Montpellier II
France
Tel: +33 (0)4.67.14.47.34

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