DNS issue with Pritunl client on Debian 12 Bookworm

Pritunl Pritunl VPN
1

It seems like there might be an issue related to DNS with the Pritunl client running on Debian 12 Bookworm.

This is what can be seen in the profile log for all clients from version 1.3.4269.93 and upwards:

Call failed: The name org.freedesktop.resolve1 was not provided by any .service files
<8>Mar 23 13:52:10 5e847c18ba2bae82-up.sh: 'busctl' exited with status 1
2026-03-23 13:52:10 WARNING: Failed running command (--up/--down): external program exited with error status: 1
2026-03-23 13:52:10 Exiting due to fatal error

The only way to establish a stable connection is to set the “Disable DNS” option, but then of course DNS resolution is not correct.

Pritunl client version 1.3.4262.38 seems to work just fine.

2

Run these commands to get the DNS configuration state.

sudo bash -x << 'EOF'
set -x
cat /etc/resolv.conf
cat /etc/resolvconf.conf
cat /etc/resolv.conf.bak
ls -la /etc/resolv.conf
resolvectl status
resolvectl dns
systemctl status systemd-resolved
resolvconf -l
NetworkManager --print-config | grep rc-manager
EOF
3

Thanks for the quick reply.

Here is the requested output:

+ set -x
+ cat /etc/resolv.conf
# Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)
#     DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN
# 127.0.0.53 is the systemd-resolved stub resolver.
# run "resolvectl status" to see details about the actual nameservers.

nameserver 192.168.1.1
search home
+ cat /etc/resolvconf.conf
cat: /etc/resolvconf.conf: No such file or directory
+ cat /etc/resolv.conf.bak
cat: /etc/resolv.conf.bak: No such file or directory
+ ls -la /etc/resolv.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 May 16  2025 /etc/resolv.conf -> ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf
+ resolvectl status
bash: line 6: resolvectl: command not found
+ resolvectl dns
bash: line 7: resolvectl: command not found
+ systemctl status systemd-resolved
Unit systemd-resolved.service could not be found.
+ resolvconf -l
# resolv.conf from NetworkManager
search home
nameserver 192.168.1.1
+ NetworkManager --print-config
+ grep rc-manager
# rc-manager=
4

It looks like you have modified the system DNS configuration. The Pritunl client will look for 127.0.0.53 and systemd-resolved in the file /etc/resolv.conf to detect systemd-resolved. You have this in the file but nameserver 192.168.1.1 indicates it is not actually using the systemd stub resolver. Deleting those commented lines at in the /etc/resolv.conf should correct the issue. I may make changes to the DNS code to detect this but the system resolv conf file should still be corrected.