Private DNS and/or DHCP are not working

Reviewed on 22 July 2024 • Published on 13 July 2023

There are some cases when a Private Network’s private DNS or DHCP may not work ‘out of the box’ for attached resources. Read on to find out how to fix these problems.

Basic steps to try first

Make sure that DHCP is activated on your Private Network.
Ensure that you have tried detaching/reattaching the affected resources from/to the Private Network, particularly if they are older resources or you have changed their name.

Resources with a dot in their hostname

Issues may arise with internal addressing if you give your resource a name that includes a dot (.). Try renaming your resource to a name that does not include a dot, then detach/reattach it to the Private Network in order to update DNS.

Private Networks with a name that is also a TLD

See our dedicated document for a full explanation of this problem, and suggested solutions.

Distributions running Network Manager

Private DNS should work out of the box for attached resources with Debian-based distributions, and for distributions using systemd-resolved, such as Ubuntu.

It does not work out of the box for Linux distributions using Network Manager, such as RockyLinux. If your resource is running RockyLinux, or another distribution using Network Manager, you should manually configure the system to use the nameserver 169.254.169.254. You will then be able to resolve the name of your resources, as well as public domain names.

DHCP is not working

DHCP should work out of the box for attached resources running any and all Linux distributions. However, when it comes to ArchLinux, we are aware of a problem when it comes to setting a Classless Static Route to our service IP address 169.254.169.254.

In this case, if you are using systemd-networkd and do not have a route to our service IP address 169.254.169.254, you should try updating and upgrading the packages on your system.

There is also a known bug affecting Debian Bullseye, that prevents DHCP clients from correctly applying the default route. For this specific bug, we recommend using another distribution, such as Debian Bookworm.