Fixing WSL2 DNS Resolution

Posted on Jan 4, 2021

Recently, I’ve switched to using WSL2 on my Windows machine. It works quite well and has a ton of performance improvements over WSL, but there’s a major annoyance with the way DNS is configured through the Hyper-V Virtual Ethernet adapter. VPN users beware! There are known DNS leak issues with WSL2 (documented here ) that could compromise the privacy of your web traffic.

This isn’t that big of an issue for me, however, since I don’t really use WSL2 for anything I’d consider critical (mostly just using network connectivity for installing packages, pushing to git repos, etc). The bigger problem is that my DNS queries will fail to resolve at all while I have active VPN connections. Here’s a quick workaround, documented below for my own future reference and anyone else who might be having this same issue:

Create a file at the following location:

/etc/wsl.conf

It should have the following contents:

[network]
generateResolvConf = false

Run wsl --shutdown in a cmd window and restart WSL2.
Create another file: /etc/resolv.conf, replacing it if it already exists.
It should have the following contents:

nameserver YOUR_DNS_SERVER_HERE

Repeat step 3. Now WSL2 should be using the DNS server you’ve specified!

Note: For step 5, replace YOUR_DNS_SERVER_HERE with your desired DNS server. I like to use Adguard DNS servers , but some other options are 8.8.8.8 for Google DNS, 1.1.1.1 for CloudFlare DNS, and 45.90.28.192 for NextDNS.

Credit: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4285#issuecomment-522201021