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Have read quite a lot of questions about this problem, but everyone just explain how to solve it (which do not work for me) and none what I have found actually explain what the reason for it is. Personally I get this problem with my home network All The Time! Literally about 20 times a day and every time it happens it can last up to 3 months if I am unlucky.

My ISP say that it is a problem with my router, I have 2 routers now. One ASUS and one Linksys, the ASUS have default firmware and the Linksys have dd-wrt. I run 2 arch linux PCs and one Android smart phone. All devices get the same problem when it occurs. At the moment I use the Asus one because the Linksys never recovered while ASUS have internet access for about 5 min before loosing connection for about 10 min. Have borrowed a friends router and it is the same problem with that one. I can with all of them setup a LAN without any problem.

Is this a problem on my end or over at my ISP? I would really appreciate an answer for this because when I call them they say that I am doing something wrong and are responsible for it, but I honestly think they are to blame. When the internet goes down compleatly I can still share the wifi from my phone and it works, so do not believe I have miss configured the wifi on my PC's.

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  • It could be a name resolution problem as the error message describe it. But since name resolution is often one of the first step of connection establishment, it could also be a more global connection problem. Could you try to ping directly an IP address when this problem occurs (like 8.8.8.8)?
    – S. Brottes
    Feb 5, 2021 at 8:39
  • Sorry forgot to mention this. When this problem occure I usually cannot ping ip addresses either, but do not get a name resolution error then, but instead time out. Tried it now and got 80% package loss on average when pinging an IP address and name resolution error when pinging a hostname
    – page290
    Feb 5, 2021 at 8:53
  • The reason for not getting name resolution error when pinging an IP is ofc because I do not have to look up the IP using a DNS. So it just seem to be a problem with the connection itself
    – page290
    Feb 5, 2021 at 9:08
  • If you can't even ping IP Address, it's probably not DNS related. You could try to use a traceroute to find the nodes between which it's happening. You could maybe see if the problem is on your side or on ISP side.
    – S. Brottes
    Feb 5, 2021 at 9:50
  • That was an excellent tip! Can see now that it gets stuck at my gateway, tried to switch Ethernet cable for a new one and same problem, stuck at gateway. So most probably there is a fault in the Ethernet connector that is in my wall (since I have had the same problem with so many routers/cables). Thank you!
    – page290
    Feb 5, 2021 at 10:04

1 Answer 1

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"Temporary failure in name" resolution means that your system thinks that the configuration for your name resolution is sane, but that it is unable to resolve names at this moment.

Most of the time, this is because the DNS server is not available for the system. That again may be caused by a very large number of reasons, from a faulty cable to ISP servers being down.

In general, debugging this has a number of steps:

  • Can I ping the gateway on it's IP address?
  • Can I ping other hosts on the network on their IP address?
  • check what your DNS server is (8.8.8.8, your ISP's DNS, the router/gateway,...)

And, then depending on what your DNS sever is:

  • If it is your own router/gateway, re-check the DNS settings on that device. Make sure that the source server is correct, recheck everything.

  • If it is your own router/gateway, you might try with nmap to see if the port is open

  • try

nslookup
server (your server's IP address)
test.com

If that works, the network part of the name resolution works and you need to look at your system's specifics.

If that doesn't work, try 8.8.8.8 as the server. If that works, there is something wrong with your normal DNS server.

There are of course many more causes of failure. I know of an ISP that redirects all DNS trafic towards its own DNS (to serve adds for non-existing hostnames). In that case other debugging actions may be necessary.

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