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I have a Kali Linux installed in VMWare Workstation. The virtual machines is configured for using NAT. The host server is Windows 8.1.

DNS in Kali is not working:

$ ping -c1 www.google.es
ping: unknown host www.google.es

Networking is working:

$ ping 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_req=1 ttl=128 time=32.0 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_req=2 ttl=128 time=25.0 ms

DNSs configured are Google's:

$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.8.9

Any idea?

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  • 2
    What does sudo dhclient -v wlan0 (substitue wlan0 for your interface) say? And dig google.com?
    – agtoever
    Commented Jan 29, 2015 at 11:14

3 Answers 3

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There are two possible points of failure:

  • is TCP/UDP connectivity to the DNS server working?
  • is the C library configured to use DNS in the first place, and if so, using which resolver library?

The first point can be tested using any of the commands suggested before:

host www.google.es 8.8.8.8
nslookup www.google.es 8.8.8.8
dig +short www.google.es @8.8.8.8

Since the DNS server can be pinged successfully, we know IP routing works and ICMP traffic is allowed - but it tells us nothing about DNS traffic specifically, i.e. TCP and UDP traffic to port 53. A firewall could block that without blocking ICMP, or vice versa.

For the second possible point of failure, run:

grep hosts /etc/nsswitch.conf

If the answer does not include keywords dns, resolve nor lwres, then the hostname resolution in this VM has been configured to not use DNS at all - the keywords will indicate which methods are actually going to be used.

  • dns is the classic DNS resolver, configured via /etc/resolv.conf
  • lwres is libnss-lwres: if you find this, also verify that a lwresd process is running and it has not been configured to use a custom configuration file instead of the default /etc/resolv.conf
  • resolve indicates libnss-resolve: if you find this, verify that the systemd-resolved process is running, and use the systemd-resolve --status command to view the current DNS configuration. In this case the classic /etc/resolv.conf might not necessarily be used at all, other than to direct applications that use their own DNS resolver libraries to send their queries to systemd-resolved.

To test whether or not an application can successfully use whichever hostname resolution library has been configured, use getent hosts www.google.es. If you think the application uses IPv4 only, or specifies a preference for IPv4, you can also test with getent ahostsv4 www.google.es. Likewise, to test specifically for IPv6 only, you can use getent ahostsv6 www.google.es.

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Try to use host or nslookup and force it to ask a special server

$ host www.google.es 8.8.8.8
$ nslookup www.google.es 8.8.8.8
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Or, dig www.google.es @8.8.8.8 Try other hostnames as well.

There may be needed to check if DNS port 53 is open (mostly UDP, but TCP as well )

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