How to permanently change DNS nameservers in Ubuntu 18.04.3? Wiki article is not working.

Question

Hello,

I am trying to permanently change the DNS nameserver being using on my droplet.

I following this article: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-do-i-switch-my-dns-resolvers-away-from-google

But the permanent fix option is not working.

The file “/etc/network/interfaces.d/50-cloud-init.cfg” does not exist. And when I add nameservers to the file “/etc/network/interfaces” and restart the droplet, no change occurs. The file is saved, but the DNS server being used are still the default ones.

My “/etc/network/interfaces” file looks like the following:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*

dns-nameservers 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220

Am I missing something? I am new to Linux.

Bobby Iliev · Accepted Answer

Hello,

With the older Ubuntu distributions, you could do that with the /etc/resolv.conf however, with Ubuntu 18.04 you should make the change in the netplan configs at /etc/netplan/*.yaml files.

The file would look something like this:

network:
    version: 2
    ethernets:
        eth0:
            addresses:
            - 123.123.123.123/20
            - 10.0.0.0/16
            gateway4: 123.123.123.1
            match:
                macaddress: cc:8c:11:e1:1b:81
            nameservers:
                addresses:
                - 8.8.8.8
                - 8.8.4.4
                search: []
            set-name: eth0

To change your nameservers, just update the addresses under the nameservers section. And then run:

sudo netplan apply

Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby

bunji cord · Answer

Just to point out for servers:

For persistence through reboots, you must create a file to stop cloudinit from resetting 50-cloud-init.yaml… (tested on ubuntu 20 server on DO today)

Copied from the default /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml : This file is generated from information provided by the datasource. Changes to it will not persist across an instance reboot. To disable cloud-init’s network configuration capabilities, write a file /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/99-disable-network-config.cfg with the following: network: {config: disabled}

*** Info: The actual addresses will be nameservers rather than redirects to resolvconf, so no 8.8.8.8 etc in the yaml file.

Question

How to permanently change DNS nameservers in Ubuntu 18.04.3? Wiki article is not working.

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