I'm experiencing, what appears to be a hostname resolution issue in ubuntu 12.04 server edition when configuring my computer to use a static ip.

In /etc/network/interfaces:

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.28
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

Running $ sudo apt-get upgrade, results in a 'Failed to fetch...':

. . . W: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise-backports/universe/i18n/Translation-en_US Something wicked happened resolving 'us.archive.ubuntu.com:http' (-5 - No address associated with hostname)

W: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise-backports/universe/i18n/Translation-en Something wicked happened resolving 'us.archive.ubuntu.com:http' (-5 - No address associated with hostname)

E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

When I change my /etc/network/interfaces to:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Everything works fine.

Looking into /etc/resolv.conf provides some more hints...In cases where I was getting the resolving issue, resolve.conf was empty. No nameservers were specified. When I changed to dhcp from static and restarted networking. /etc/resolv.conf gets written to: 'nameserver 192.168.1.1'. Switching back from dhcp to static and restarting doesn't remove the nameserve entry. When I restart the system with static set, resolv.conf is empty. When I restart the system with dhcp set, resolv.conf has nameserver 192.168.1.1. So it appears that the issue is that resolve.conf is not getting written to correctly? Which package/code is responsible for writing to resolv.conf? Is there a particular package that I can take a look at open issues?

UPDATE: istream posted a good article discussing changes to resolve.conf in 12.04. http://www.stgraber.org/2012/02/24/dns-in-ubuntu-12-04/