Comment 17 for bug 1003842

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Thomas Hood (jdthood) wrote : Re: Precise NM with "dns=dnsmasq" breaks systems with non-equivalent upstream nameservers

When a decision was made to introduce dnsmasq I doubt that anyone fully realized that this would impair name resolution on systems connected to networks with nonequivalent nameservers ("bad" networks). Dnsmasq was introduced and works well most of the time. For those for whom it does not work well solutions need to be found.

Ideal would be automagical detection of and adaptation to bad neworks by dnsmasq. It might work like this. On encountering NODATA or NXDOMAIN, dnsmasq reiterates the query to all nameservers listed earlier than the one that answered. If one of those nameservers returns an address then dnsmasq uses that answer and switches to strict-order mode until the next change in the nameserver address list.

And NetworkManager should, as Simon indicates, offer a way to restrict certain domain lookups to certain nameservers. A user on a bad network who has configured this correctly will avoid triggering dnsmasq's (global) strict-order fallback behavior.
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Thomas