"dns: failed to respond: dns: bad rdata" absolute or complete domain names, might these be an issue?

[Ben Hyde]

I'm a newbie, sorry.

In a fit of enthusiasm I decided to install consul on a few dozen machines at AWS.

I've done almost nothing with these; beyond standing them up.  But they give

a good first impression:

       /sudo:root@kira-rpa3:/mnt/core/ #$ consul members
       Node               Address              Status  Type    Build  Protocol  DC
      bastion0.kira.np.  10.144.24.250:8301   alive   client  0.7.0  2         dc1
      bastion1.kira.np.  10.144.64.234:8301   alive   client  0.7.0  2         dc1
      con1.kira.np.      10.144.87.208:8301   alive   server  0.7.0  2         dc1
      con2.kira.np.      10.144.130.160:8301  alive   server  0.7.0  2         dc1
      ... etc.

I am observing "... consul[3322]: dns: failed to respond: dns: bad rdata" in all the client logs.

My insta-theory is that it's due to the hostnames on these machines, all of which are

what some people call "complete", and some people call "absolute" as vs. relative.

Which is to say that have that trailing period.

I have them using a private dns in the AWS VPC.

Any sage advice would be much appreciated.

 Thanks for the software :)  - ben

ps.

$ cat /etc/consul/consul.conf
{
"server": false,
"disable_update_check": true,
"log_level": "INFO",
"enable_syslog": true,
"retry_join": [ "con0", "con1", "con2" , "con3", "con4" ],
"ports" : { "dns": 53 },
"data_dir": "/var/consul",
"recursors": ["10.144.0.2"]
}

[mke...@hashicorp.com]

Hi Ben,

Consul isn't going to like those node names. Newer version emit a warning for that. Also you should be able to set the node_name configuration as described here to override the auto-detected name. Basically anything with '.' in it is not going to be discoverable via DNS due to the way DNS names are synthesized with tags. Having a node named x.y.z and you then query for x.y.z.node.consul internally it looks like you are querying for tag X, tag Y and node Z, not node X.Y.Z. So the lookup will fail.

Matt Keeler

[Ben Hyde]

Thanks Matt,  That should get me back on track.   ... i ought to read more doc ... real soon now.  - ben