Saturday, April 11, 2015

vpn - How to make short (not fully qualified) hostnames work with Mountain Lion, Tunnelblick, pfSense, OpenVPN

I use Tunnelblick 3.3beta21b on Mac OS X 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion) to connect to a pfSense/OpenVPN virtual private network. When connected to the VPN, I can access machines in our datacenter. This is pfSense 2.0.1.



Machines in the datacenter are running Ubuntu 12.04 Precise. When I'm on a machine in the datacenter, I can ping other machines with short (not fully qualified) hostnames:



web1:~  $ ping web2
PING web2 (10.10.160.6) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from web2 (10.10.160.6): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.380 ms



The resolv.conf file on any given Ubuntu machine in the datacenter looks like this:



web1:~  $ cat /etc/resolv.conf 
nameserver 10.10.160.2
nameserver 10.10.160.45


Unfortunately, when I'm at home connected via TunnelBlick/OpenVPN, shortnames do not work from my Mac:



mac:~  $ ping web2

ping: cannot resolve web2: Unknown host


However, nslookup returns the correct IP address for "web2" and if I ping with a trailing dot, it works:



mac:~  $ ping web2.
PING web2 (10.10.160.6) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from web2 (10.10.160.6): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.380 ms



When connected via Tunnelblick, my Mac's resolv.conf looks like this. Note that Tunnelblick added the "search" line; it is not present when I'm disconnected from the VPN:



#
# Mac OS X Notice
#
# This file is not used by the host name and address resolution
# or the DNS query routing mechanisms used by most processes on
# this Mac OS X system.
#
# This file is automatically generated.

#
search company.com
nameserver 10.10.160.45
nameserver 8.8.8.8


How can I configure Mac OS X or Pfsense/OpenVPN or Tunnelblick so I can use short hostnames from my Mac?

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