the /etc/host.conf file is not ment to place the nameservers.
This file specifies how the nameresolving should happen and not where the servers are located.
The keywords are order, trim, multi, nospoof, spoof and reorder.
Mine, for example looks like this:

# The "order" line is only used by old versions of the C library.
order hosts,bind
multi on


As Bashibk pointed out,
you should edit the /etc/resolv.conf file.

This is mine:
# Generated by NetworkManager
domain morraye.local
search morraye.local
nameserver 192.168.1.1
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Note that the domain and search properties point out to morraye.local!
This is not what you should use.
It’s just my home domain (not the .local) that I’ve set up.
The primary nameserver is pointing to 192.168.1.1 as this is my router that is caching the resolved DNS query’s.
This is (for me) the quickest way to resolve, thus the quickest way to surf the internet
The second nameserver is one of the opendsn dns servers, but I’m going to change that soon.

For more information about the /etc/resolv.conf file and all of its options, you can check the man-page on linux.die.net or the one by SUN found here.

You edited the wrong file, I think. The nameserver stuff should go in “/etc/resolv.conf”. Not in the host.conf…

X

I used http://www.dnsserverlist.org/ to get a list of dns servers. Then I edited the host.conf file adding the lines:

nameserver 216.52.1.33
nameserver 128.107.241.184

When I try to connect to the internet I get the error:

/etc/host.conf: line 4: bad command `nameserver 216.52.1.33′
/etc/host.conf: line 5: bad command `nameserver 128.107.241.184′

I’m on Ubuntu 9.10

But most common things can be done trough the GUI, as Serge mentioned.

You forget that “Linux” is much more than only a Desktop oriented system. If you google on this subjkect, you obviously will find much more references on manually changing dns, or on changing dns on other systems different tnan the one at your hand.

Network-manager, which is the newest tool for managing network (and dns) on a Desktop nowadays, also is pretty new, and lotys of references on changing dns are not up to date or just describing something different than.

Now, to get back to your problem, as said, yes, it can be difficult to find the right description when googling it, for aforementioned reasons. For those same reasons, this original blog post was giving bad information by the way. Yes that is a problem with Linux, things are not black and white. Linux gives you more control, but that comes at a price: it’s harder to master. You certainly have a point there, and I’m the first to say Desktop Linux has a stability problem (on all sorts of levels)

But looking at my own 9.10 desktop right now, I go to the menu, System, Preferences, Network COnnections, and I get the GUI you failed to find. There’s also an icon in the notification area, and when plugging your ethernet cable, you see that icon move. Clicking on that icon cab get you to the same GUI. That GUI let’s you modify DNS.

You can hardly say this is extremely hard to find, can you?

(I’d even say that this GUI is many time easier than the network centre in Windows since Vista, but that’s off course subjective.)

By all means be critical of my comment on the difficulty of changing DNS in Ubuntu 9.10. But in doing so, say how to do it. So far as I can tell, there is no GUI in 9.10 for changing DNS, and I have changed DNS frequently in Windows and other Linux OS / earlier Ubuntu OS.

Google the subject. Look at the results. Nowhere, that I can see, is there reference to a GUI: rather, there are all sorts of contortions in obscure parts of the OS config and other files.

My point is that to a non-expert, the DNS cannot readily and simply be changed.

The original post and comments describes how to *manually* change dns settings, under the hood, or on a server. The original mistake was that on a desktop environment, you have a proper GUI tool to do that, just like you would on Windows.

Also, it’s not because something looks harder to do, that automatically means it is a less good way. User friendliness and intuitivity are subjective matters.

Linux let’s you have more control when you want to, and that is often the primary reason why people like it.