[Bug 959037] Re: NM-controlled dnsmasq prevents other DNS servers from starting

[Robin Battey]

I just read this entire chain, and I'm surprised not to see mention of
using an NSS plugin, like Avahi (and ldap and NIS and /etc/hosts and DNS
itself).  I expect it would be simple enough to write a small NSS plugin
that merely calls the NM-dnsmasq (running on localhost on a port other
than 53) and placing it in front of (or instead of) "dns" on the hosts
line in /etc/nsswitch.conf. This would not conflict at *all* with any
local DNS servers, and would work for anything that used the libc
resolver.  It's also vastly cleaner than the "let's change multiple
upstream packages" options I see listed above.

For extra points, it's probably past time to make a "dbus" nss plugin,
which could be configured to talk to NM, which in turn would ask its
personal dnsmasq instance running on any available port, or however it
decided to track such things in the future.  This would be a clean
interface, with all resolving going through libc, with a well-defined
API chain (libc --NSS--> dbusplugin --DBUS--> NetworkManager --DNS-->
dnsmasq), and allow for NetworkManager to change the last step (DNS
protocol to dnsmasq) to whatever in the future without re-architecting
anything underneath.

Or have the NSS plugin directly access dnsmasq and have NetworkManager
manage its configuration, to follow dnsmasq port changes or what have
you. It's not as future-proof, but it still gets the job done without
conflicting with any resolvers.

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Title:
  NM-controlled dnsmasq prevents other DNS servers from starting

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