dnsmasq now works for DNS requests - after initial "query refused"

For a long time, I was having a problem where dnsmasq refused to respond to DNS requests and gave an error message "query refused".

At first I thought that it might have been because dnsmasq wasn't running or not binding to the proper port, but after using "netstat -ap" and running "dnsmasq -d", it was obvious that dnsmasq was running and able to receive the queries.

So why wasn't dnsmasq failing to do IP lookups and interact with the upstream DNS servers? Even though from most documentation (such as on Debian and ubuntu.wordpress.com) suggests that a simple apt-get would do the trick?

Anyway, I found that my /etc/resolv.conf had only 127.0.0.1 listed as its nameserver, and dnsmasq was using this as its resolv.conf . I looked around to see if I could find another file that the resolvconf binary was generating that had the actual nameservers, and I found this file: /etc/resolvconf/run/interface/eth0

I change a line in /etc/dnsmasq.conf to read:

resolv-file=/etc/resolvconf/run/interface/eth0

And hey presto, it worked!