/etc/resolv.conf contents reversed after rebuilding nfsroot

[CSCI Technician]

A quick follow up in case someone else is looking at this: I submitted 
the issue and fix to the dracut project and the issue has been fixed in 
the repo.

https://github.com/dracutdevs/dracut/commit/22c8a5c73f3f5bea2e6020b63060774b79008847

Cheers,
Merlin


On 10/11/19 12:11 PM, CSCI Technician wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
>
> Found the bug causing my resolv.conf issue.
>
> Dracut creates /run/initramfs/stat/etc/resolv.conf from 
> /tmp/net.*.resolv.conf in the script write-ifcfg.sh.  A change was put 
> in last year that sorts and uniques the resolv.conf file.  A side 
> affect of this is that the source file /tmp/net.*.resolv.conf such as 
> this:
>
> search foo.com
> nameserver 192.168.240.5
> nameserver 10.200.8.97
> nameserver 10.200.8.61
>
> produces a resolv.conf that is exactly reversed in order which, in my 
> case, causes name lookups to fail during imaging.
>
> The change to dracut and code in question can be found here
> https://github.com/dracutdevs/dracut/commit/ee18dd2b88d6767902d442baa92c95f7be69c265#diff-380be46cd9d6f3ba8e2dc14509fe5b86 
>
>
> I'll submit an issue/change to the dracut project but if anyone using 
> FAI runs into the same issue (name lookup failures in the FAI remote 
> log file)...
>
> To fix the issue I did the following so that the contents is uniqued 
> but not sorted:
> 291c291
> <     done | sort -u > /run/initramfs/state/etc/resolv.conf
> ---
> >     done | awk '!($0 in a) { a[$0]; print }' > 
> /run/initramfs/state/etc/resolv.conf
>
>
> "awk '!($0 in a) { a[$0]; print }'" is a slightly more 
> readable/efficient version of "awk '!a[$0]++'" but either works.
>
> For my FAI install, this change needed to be done in two places:
> /srv/fai/nfsroot/usr/lib/dractu/modules.d/45ifcfg/write-ifcfg.sh
> /srv/tftp/fai/initrd.img-4.*-amd64:/lib/dracut/hooks/pre-pivot/85-write-ifcfg.sh 
>
>
>
> thanks for all the assistance and helping me narrow this one down. Now 
> I can proceed to my next step in upgrading my FAI server to buster.
>
> Cheers,
> Merlin.
>
> On 10/9/19 12:57 PM, Thomas Lange wrote:
>> Hi Merlin,
>>
>> if I understand your correct, the resolv.conf inside the nfsroot is
>> always correct.
>>
>> Upgrading the nfsroot using -kvp did not rebuild the whole nfsroot, it
>> just upgraded it without changing resolv.conf
>>
>> Using fai-make-nfsroot -fvp rebuilds the whole nfsroot.
>> But building the nfsroot just copies the /etc/resolv.conf from the FAI
>> install server into the nfsroot. This should/can not reverse the
>> order of the entries in resolv.conf.
>>
>> When the client does a network installation using PXE it uses the
>> resolv.conf from the config space or from inside the nfsroot.
>> See lib/subroutines line 1066ff
>> We also use lib/create_resolv_conf which copies the resolv.conf from
>> the initrd (created by dracut) or loops through the list defined by
>> $DNSSRVS (which comes from the DHCP server and is created by 
>> ./lib/dhclient-perl).
>>
>> The difference between 5.3.6 and 5.8.x may be that we copy the
>> resolv.conf from the config space nowadays. IIRC we did not that
>> before. But I'm not sure. Maybe the order of the nameserver in
>> $DNSSRVS was always reversed but noone had problems with it.
>>
>> So, please check all resolv.conf versions (on the FAI server itself, 
>> in the
>> nfsroot, inside the initrd, on the client) and tell which are the
>> wrong version. Maybe change all cp commands of a resolv.conf to cp -v.
>> Also check the order of DNS servers in dhcpd.conf on your dhcp server.
>>
>

-- 
Merlin Hansen
Department of Computing Science
Vancouver Island University
900 Fifth Street
Nanaimo BC  V9R 5S5
250-753-3245 x 2321
tech at csci.viu.ca