[PLUG] Shifting DNS

[Rich Shepard]

This morning the Sony Vaio laptop (model PCG-61A14L) refused to connect to
the 'Net. This unit is configured to connect to the Belkin WAP; it's not on
the LAN but connects to the 'Net via the WAP and router.

Checking everything related to "network not reachable" and restarting the
internet daemon, checking ifconfig, iwconfig, and everything else I isolated
the problem to /etc/resolv.conf (which I thought I had initially fixed).

For some reason overnight /etc/resolv.conf was overwritten by the Belkin WAP
and contained two lines:
server Belkin WAP
nameserver 192.168.2.1

Of course, that does nothing as the WAP has a LAN address of 192.168.55.200
and is connected to the router. So, I modified /etc/resolv.conf.working to
the most recent nameserver IPs and copied it to /etc/resolv.conf. Then the
laptop was able to connect externally.

I put the command, cp /etc/resolve.conf.working /etc/resolv.conf, in
Slackware's /etc/rc.d/rc.local as that's that last file processed when the
system boots. It took a bit of trial-and-error tweaking the contents of
rc.local, but that seems to have been the required fix.

My question is what might have changed so the WAP modifies the DNS lookup on
the laptop? The setup has been working for several years without any
problems so this new issue, while apparently fixed, could do with an
explanation to avoid future repeats or similar issues.

Carpe holiday,

Rich