Remove OpenDNS from Linux Mint

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I recently purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1, which has been an absolutely stellar laptop so far, after immediately replacing Windows with Linux (specifically, Mint).

One of the unfortunate things about Linux Mint is that it chooses to fallback DNS resolution to OpenDNS, which in the world of DNS is a sort of spyware. If the user requests a domain which doesn't exist, instead of getting an error back, OpenDNS will display one of their webpages. This has the benefit (for OpenDNS) of getting more eyes on their websites, and if I had to guess, Mint might make some sort of cut as well. The side effect is that this breaks the internet, and any scripts you may be running to check for nonexistent domains will fail.

The configuration for OpenDNS servers is stored in the following file:

/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/tail

You have two options. The first is to delete the file entirely, and no fallback DNS servers will be used. Another option is to replace the two IP addresses in the file with the DNS server of another service. I chose to do the latter, and use the Google DNS settings of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, and now I bask in the glory of an error screen when I mistype a domain name, instead of the shitty OpenDNS service.

Tags: #linux
Thomas Hunter II Avatar

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript and is an O'Reilly published author.