Comment 37 for bug 448095

Duplicate Bug #548576 reports this same problem in Kubuntu Lucid Lynx Beta 1 amd64 daily disks of 2010-03-25 and 2010-03-27.

On this network, individual hosts are set up to use DHCP and individual nameservers are not listed in /etc/network/interfaces. Predictable IP addresses are assigned by the router based on adapter MAC addresses; from the position of the host, this is a DHCP configuration.

Circumstances leading to triggering this bug were unusual:

The "install software" step of the installation process failed. (See Bug #548572; probable cause: failure of command: apt-cdrom add )

At the reboot after install, very little software was installed. Although I am not an IT professional and thus inexpert in these matters, I suspect that dhclient read the nameserver data from the router and used it to populate /etc/resolv.conf

I then installed the entire set of packages from a list which I keep routinely updated (using dpkg --set-selections < <listname>. I suspect that that process installed NetworkManager. During the same session, I also installed the proprietary video driver.

The video driver necessitated a further reboot. At this point, /etc/resolv.conf was empty. I had only local network connectivity. None to the internet.

I have worked around the problem by saving the original resolv.conf to a separate file, and running a three-line script to copy it back, and restart networking. I count this as hands-down my ugliest kludge in 28 years of breaking development software.