[PLUG] DNS weirdness on Pop OS

David Fleck dcfleck at protonmail.ch
Wed Jan 1 22:37:31 UTC 2025


I've got a System 76 laptop with Pop OS 22.04 LTS (essentially Ubuntu, as far as I can tell) installed. I've had it for almost exactly 2 years, and networking Just Worked until this past Sunday. That morning, I noticed that browsing to some web sites (but not others) became glacially slow, or timed out completely. No other machines in the house (OpenSUSE, Windows) were affected. I stepped away for a few hours, and things were back to normal, and stayed that way, until yesterday afternoon, when the same connection slowdown/failure happened again. Not all sites are affected. Some don't seem to be affected at all (e.g., Wikipedia); others resolve, but very slowly (speedtest.net); others simply time out (protonmail). Some will connect, but if they require authentication, the authentication step times out.

I've tried clearing browser caches, and uninstalling/reinstalling browsers (Brave & Chromium), to no avail.

I've tried shutting down systemd-resolved, because some internet reading makes me think that it is frequently blamed for this kind of behavior, but I don't see any difference with it shut off and an /etc/resolv.conf manually hacked into place, assuming I did it correctly:
sudo service systemd-resolved stop
sudo systemctl disable systemd-resolved
sudo systemctl mask systemd-resolved
sudo cp resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf # various values tried for nameserver: 8.8.8.8, 192.168.1.1 (local router address, which is what all the other machines are using for this)

The problem is definitely confined to this one machine, so I am assuming that there's nothing wrong with my router or other parts of my home network.

Wondering if anyone has any ideas on debugging/ what to try next. It would be a pain to nuke the laptop and install OpenSUSE, but I have no particular love for Ubuntu if it doesn't Just Work, and currently I'm about 60% of the way to replacing it at the moment.

--
- David Fleck


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