Please backport ability to customize NM-dnsmasq to 12.04

[Karl M. Davis]

The integration of Dnsmasq into NetworkManager is, overall, very convenient: it makes dealing with _some_ VPN connections on Ubuntu much easier.

However, there are still a number of VPN connections that NetworkManager doesn't support, or doesn't support fully (e.g. a number of OpenVPN configuration options). In these cases, it's necessary to configure the VPN connections the old-fashioned way: on the command line. There's also the issue that nm-applet doesn't gracefully support multiple simultaneous VPN connections (though the Network control panel now apparently does).

Unfortunately, there really isn't a way to gracefully handle the DNS changes that these manual VPN connections require in 12.04's version of Dnsmasq. It seems that 12.10's version offers /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d/, and also a D-Bus interface-- either of which would likely work. Neither of these options (or any others I'm aware of) exist for 12.04.

Right now, I find myself in the somewhat bizarre situation of considering a switch off of the LTS 12.04 release to 12.10 just to get support for a couple of VPN connections. Is there any chance that the dnsmasq.d and/or D-Bus support could be backported to 12.04? Apologies if this is the wrong forum for such a request-- couldn't think of a better one.

FYI: Such a backport was actually first suggested by one of the NetworkManager devs on dnsmasq-discuss [1].

[1] http://lists.thekelleys.org.uk/pipermail/dnsmasq-discuss/2012q4/006370.html

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.