An Emulator Networking Workaround

I use the Android SDK emulator a lot less than do many developers. I have a fair
bit of hardware and prefer to test on it, since users do not use emulators.
I usually only crack open an emulator for showing demos in
training, conference presentations, and the
like.

So, somewhere in the past few months, my emulators lost the ability to access
the Internet. The ���wireless signal��� status bar icon showed four bars with the
little ���x��� indicating no Internet access. The problem persisted across actual
networks, indicating that the problem was not tied to WiFi, VPNs, or anything
variable about my development machine.

After a lot of searching, this answer
has more or less addressed my problem. I say ���more or less��� in that I cannot
use the AVD Manager or Android Studio to start the emulator, but instead
need to start it from the command line.

For whatever reason, the emulator has some difficult obtaining the DNS server
from DHCP (or whatever facsimile of DHCP gets used by the emulator for its
networking). Instead, I need to manually stipulate the DNS server via the
-dns-server command-line option. So, I wind up running the emulator
from the command line like this:

$ANDROID_SDK/emulator/emulator -avd ... -dns-server 8.8.8.8

(where $ANDROID_SDK is where the Android SDK is installed and
... is the AVD name as found in the ~/.android/avd directory)

Then, the emulator behaves normally from a networking standpoint.