Partial DNS resolver failure – how to fix

You came here probably because you are receiving email messages from cPanel with a subject: “[yourhostcom] ⚠ Partial DNS resolver failure”.  Such emails look like:

This indicates an issue with the DNS resolvers from the file /etc/resolv.conf. So we need to remove it.

We recommend the use of the Google DNS servers – 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. More info at https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/. You should also talk with your web host.

To edit the file etc/resolv.conf you need to login to your server as “root”. The file contains now:

nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 8.8.8.8

After removing the first line and adding the second Google server, it will be:

nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

It’s very probable that you will receive such messages again after the server restart. These messages are due to the fact you are on a virtual environment and you are using a DNS system (like PowerDNS) which does not provide a caching nameserver.