Steam DNS issues resolved (for me)

[iestynapmwg]

Posting this here in the hope it might save someone else the several hours of digging!

So, i was getting the unhelpful error messages about "steam needs to be online" that i've seen others post about. I had no problems previously, this all started when i upgraded Ubuntu to 21.04. One weird symptom i don't think i've seen mentioned elsewhere: for me, the login process would fail 3 times, and then login successfully. Every time, the fourth login attempt would work. At that point i could play local games, even view the game store, but any attempt to download anything new would fail.

What finally fixed this for me was installing the nscd package. It seems that somehow Steam's DNS-based load distribution is conflicting with resolved's lookups that Steam on linux is using. Not only do you have to make sure that /etc/resolv.conf is a link to systemd-resolved's stub for the local server (i already had this, Ubuntu's default settings), but caching of DNS results is needed. Thing is, systemd disables this caching for local results! This is where nscd comes to the rescue. All i had to do is install the package... It was automatically enabled and started in systemd. At the next attempt and running Steam, i was logged in on the first attempt and my downloads started!

[class101 [OLED deck]]

Might be true but I do not understand how you could miss nscd. For me on Arch Linux, nscd is a binary part of the core/glibc package, package required by anything coded in C/C++ so almost every core components of Linux

Maybe this is a necessity when system-resolved is used in a specific mode (because several resolved mode exists as the 'preserve' mode supposed to preserve the integrity of /etc/resolv.conf for other applications reading it)

paru -F nscd
core/glibc 2.33-4 [installed: 2.33-5]
    usr/bin/nscd

[Enigmatic]

I don't use resolvd and have no issues.
ps: systemd sucks

[class101 [OLED deck]]

Well if it exists it is probably useful in some case.
For me what sucks is rather all the distros that enable the systemd-resolved service by default when it is most of the time unnecessary.

I'm pretty sure that to fix the problem mentioned here it was enough to disable the systemd-resolved service and write a conventional /etc/resolv.conf file, that's the default behavior in Arch Linux.

[Enigmatic]

yup. Resolvd is not needed. Solves no problems. Not sure why it is needed.

[Leonardo Di Namit]

Jebać Bydgoszcz

[Avalaxus]

If systemd-resolved is being used, do create symlink as follows:
ln -rsf /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf