Re: [PATCH] dnsmasq DBUS integration

[Howard Chu <hyc symas com>]

Dan Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-04-18 at 09:36 -0700, Howard Chu wrote:
> > Would also like an option to tell NM to never write /etc/resolv.conf, but no
> > point in writing that patch until there's been some discussion of this DBUS patch.
>
> What I'm very interested in here are the failure cases and how we manage
> them.  Punting the problem by saying "it's not NM's job to make sure DNS
> is set up correctly" isn't an option I'm interested in, since NM is
> often the only thing that's arbitrating between various sources of DNS
> information.

But if NM is *not* the only thing making sure DNS is set up correctly, and a 
savvy sysadmin has already painstakingly configured the network on his 
machine, there should be a (non-default of course) config option to tell NM to 
keep its grubby paws off.

On my server boxes with static network configurations I would just leave NM 
uninstalled but that breaks too many other dependencies on modern distros. On 
my laptop using dnsmasq is the only sane way to work; I've got blacklists 
configured for spam domains and such that I want active no matter what network 
I've connected to.

> At a minimum we need to verify that /etc/resolv.conf is
> "correct" and we expect it to work.  But even just logging that fact
> isn't really helpful, since that requires somebody to (a) find the logs
> and (b) determine resolv.conf isn't correct, and (c) fix the problem
> somehow.  There's a lot of places in the Linux networking stack for
> stuff like this to fall through the cracks, and I'd like to reduce the
> number of cracks instead of making more...

As default behavior I can't disagree with any of this. But if someone is 
actively managing their own environment there needs to be a way to configure 
NM to cause minimal interference.

> Dan
>
> > Howard Chu wrote:
> > > Just refreshing a patch I posted here before...
> > > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2011-January/msg00029.html
> > > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=551747
> > >
> > > I don't see any conflict with libvirt, since that dnsmasq instance is running
> > > with its own private dnsmasq.conf already.
> > >
> > > This patch is relative to current git master, but also applies cleanly to the
> > > 0.9.1 source used in current Ubuntu 12.x.
> > >
> > > As with this poster
> > > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2011-January/msg00024.html
> > > I just want NM to leave /etc/resolv.conf alone.


--
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/