No, unfortunately. It consistently works when connected to Mullvad on both wireless and cellular networks. It briefly worked without Mullvad after a routine software update but its back to its old ways.

What I should probably do next, just to be thorough, is boot Mint or Tails from USB and see if it all works.

Since I dont keep anything on this device, reinstalling wont be a major pain. Ive just had enough other things going on that this hasn’t bubbled to the top of my list.

Thanks for the info, I’ll read through the docs and hopefully get this up and running again in the near future. Fortunately, nothing here is mission critical and I can still use the machine with VPN active. Getting resolv.conf back in working order appears to be the right solution.

Yes I believe that Mullvad routes you to their DNS server so that explains why it works when connected to VPN. If I attempt an nslookup when NOT connected to VPN it fails and the server it attempts to contact is 127.0.0.53. When I connect to VPN the nslookup succeeds, and it uses the same server address.

I then disconnect from VPN and ping the ip address that I just looked up (I chose etsy) and the ping goes through so this seems to be a DNS lookup issue. Is 127.0.0.53 the right server address? I would expect it to use my DHCP server address of 192.168.x.x format.