Comment 131 for bug 959037

You may be right that developing a new "nm-dns" module would be easier than trying to enhance the existing dns module to support nonstandard ports.

But the more immediately relevant comparison is the comparison between the current solution and any solution involving a new or an enhanced NSS module. The current solution is to run nm-dnsmasq at 127.0.1.1:53. This solution has already been rolled out and seems to be working well. (To my own surprise I haven't seen any complaints related to the switch from 127.0.0.1 to 127.0.1.1, even though I have been following AskUbuntu and ubuntuforums.) Any alternative has to offer significant benefits if it's going to be considered for adoption, considering the amount of work and the risk involved. What benefits would the nm-dns module or the enhanced dns module give us relative to what we have now? One is: the ability to run nm-dnsmasq on another port, freeing up port 53 for BIND named listening on ALL:53. What else? Would the NSS-module approach make it easier to implement per-user caches, for example? (I see that Solaris provides per-user instances of nscd for this purpose.)

Robin, please submit a version of your comment #129 as a new bug report against network-manager, requesting that the connection to nm-dnsmasq be implemented by means of a new NSS module. Give your arguments in favor. Then we can continue the discussion in an open bug report rather than in this fix-released one.