Some days I hate computers. Today is one of those days. My work computer froze over the weekend (which is another long, frustrating story that I won't go into right now), so I had to reboot. As usual, I logged into our Pulse Secure VPN, and opened up Chrome. And Chrome can't resolve anything. I can't get to regular internet sites or intranet sites. What the heck?
My first thought is that this is somehow proxy related. But no, even when disabling the proxy, I still can't resolve internal hostnames.
But tools like dig
and ping
work. I open up Firefox, and that works too.
OK, that's weird. I open up chrome://net-internals/#dns
in Chrome and confirm
that it can't resolve anything. I try flushing the cache, but that doesn't
work. I try a few other things, like disabling DNS prefetching and safe
browsing, but none of those help either.
I take a look at /etc/resolv.conf
, which contains a VPN DNS server presumably
added by Pulse Secure, and 127.0.0.53
for the systemd-resolved
resolver. I
confirm that resolvectl
does not know about the Pulse Secure DNS server. I
add it manually with resolvectl dns tun0 <server>
, and Chrome starts working
again. OK, well that's good. But how do we fix it permanently?
This seems relevant: PulseSecure VPN does not work with
systemd-resolved. Oh, maybe
not. The "fix" is to publish documentation that the Pulse Secure developers
should read. Sigh. After reading more closely, I see something about the
resolvconf
command, which they do already support. I don't seem to have that
command, but that is easily fixed by a apt install resolvconf
, and I confirm
that after reconnecting to the VPN, systemd-resolved
knows of the VPN DNS
servers. And Chrome works. Yay!
So what happened that this suddenly became a problem? I'm not sure. One
possibility is that Chrome started ignoring /etc/resolv.conf
and directly
using systemd-resolved
if it appears to be available.
I really hate when my computer stops working, so I hope that if you are affected by this problem and find this blog post, it helps you out.
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