bobpeers -> blog

I posted a very similar article using Fedora 9 but it seems that things have changed between Fedora 9 and 10.

The old instructions mentioned adding the DNS servers to your /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf file but this file does not even exist on Fedora 10. It turns out that you need to add the lines to /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0 (change eth0 to the connection you wish to edit) as shown here, my file now looks like this.

# Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T
DEVICE=eth1
HWADDR=00:00:00:00:00:00
ONBOOT=no
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=no
IPV6INIT=no
NM_CONTROLLED=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
# add these lines with your DNS servers
DNS1=208.67.222.222
DNS2=208.67.220.220

Rstart your networking to see the changes. If you’re using NetworkManager and right click on the applet to edit the connections you will see that the IPV4 tab now says ‘Automatic (DHCP) addresses only’ with the DNS servers listed in the box below.

I decided to switch to using nameservers from OpenDNS just to see if it made a difference compared to my ISP’s nameservers. You don’t need to sign up if you don’t want, you are free to just use their nameservers as you wish (which are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220).

The main problem is that I use Network Manager to control my network and if you try to edit the connection from Network Manager but still use dhcp then it will, by default, just get the nameservers from your ISP and ignore any other servers you manually add.

Fortunately the solution is very simple. As root open the file /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf (assuming your wired interface is eth0 of course) and add the line as shown.

# vi /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf
prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220; #add this line
send host-name "your-hostname";  # temporary RHL ifup addition

Next just restart your network.

# /sbin/service network restart

At this point I could not see my wired connection in Network Manager (the entry was greyed out) so I manually started the interface.

# /sbin/ifup eth0

This brought eth0 up and from then on Network Manager worked fine with the new nameservers. It might just be psychological but browsing does seems slightly faster, just a little bit less delay with each page load. I’ll leave it set up like this for a while to see how it goes, it’s easy enough to switch back at any time but for now I’m very happy.