how to wget a file on a remote server connected using ssh?

Question

I am connected to my university computer using SSH as follows :

sudo ssh [email protected]

However once connected, I'm not able to download any file on the server using wget like this :

server_user@server:~$ wget http://example.com/somefile

If I do that, I get following error:

--2020-07-28 10:14:46--  https://example.com/somefile
Resolving example.com (example.com)... failed: Name or service not known.
wget: unable to resolve host address ‘example.com’

Also I'm not able to install any package using pip on the remote server. How shoud I do these things? Thanks in advance :)

PS : of course the address is not the example.com. I've just used it temporarily here for the example purpose. It is a real http address from which I can download file locally using wget, but doing it on server raises the error reported above.

Answer 1

To know the exact problem I'll need more details about the server. But actually it just boils down to a DNS-problem.

Contact the admin of this server and mention that there is a problem with DNS and that resolving the A and AAAA records of example.com fail.

Temporary solution: replace example.com by the IP of the server.
(Running a ping example.com on your computer will show you the ip)

Edit: You mentioned that you also have a problem with installing python modules (with pip). This is because of the same reason, pip will try to download them from a website of which it only knows the hostname and not the ip.

Edit 2: You can also do some research yourself on why resolving fails but i would be careful here !
Some admins like a bit of help from users, others can get really angry when users start snooping around.
When in doubt: don't do it.
Anyway, here are some commands that can provide you more info:

• dig -t A example.com @8.8.8.8 | grep -v '^;' | grep A (should show you the ip of example.com)
• dig -t A example.com | grep -v '^;' | grep A (should show the same)
• resolvectl status | grep Server (should show you the dnsservers of your university)
• systemctl status systemd-resolved (should be active)
• journalctl -u systemd-resolve (should not contain errors)

Answer 2

The server has no DNS resolution - perhaps it has intentionally no access to the internet. But you can use scp to upload files to the server.