Solving a Docker in VirtualBox DNS issue

I've recently been playing with Docker on Windows in conjunction with Linux on Windows. I'm really amazed at how cool the stuff coming out of Microsoft is under Satya Nadella.

When I was using Docker Toolbox on Windows my Dockerfiles would build correctly but as soon as I tried to run them in a Virtualbox host they would fail with the error "Something wicked happened resolving 'archive.ubuntu.com:http' (-5 - No address associated with hostname)"

Of course this error wasn't distribution specific and none of the distros I tried were working.

The stack that I am using is Windows Home hosting Ubuntu on VirtualBox which is running Docker. I'm using bash on Linux for Windows because it's easier to do stuff like ssh but it's not relevant to this setup.

I tried setting the DNS in the Docker setup by using RUN steps to update /etc/resolv. This felt a bit hacky and didn't work anyway.

In the end the fix was to go to my Windows shell and run ipconfig to get its DNS servers. I then went and edited /etc/default/docker in my VirtualBox guest server and set the Docker options to use this DNS. After restarting the docker service it was able to resolve DNS properly.

# Use DOCKER_OPTS to modify the daemon startup options.
DOCKER_OPTS="--dns 192.168.1.254"

I had installed Docker with the package but I think if you install with binary you would set the DNS when you start up the daemon.

Ironically Docker was easier to use with the Windows toolkit but I'll be deploying to Linux machines so I wanted to get this working under Ubuntu.

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