Fedora and fallback DNS servers [LWN.net]

Fedora and fallback DNS servers

Posted Mar 1, 2021 8:15 UTC (Mon) by pmb00cs (subscriber, #135480)
In reply to: Fedora and fallback DNS servers by gnu_lorien
Parent article: Fedora and fallback DNS servers

I can't remember the last time I have had to manually set DNS on an end device (server or client). It's not that I haven't had network issues, but network issues get fixed at the network level. Sometimes that has been by me, on my network, sometimes that has been by others on their network.

When I have had to set DNS settings manually on end devices I've had mixed results. Sometimes it would have worked, and I carried on. Sometimes it would not, and I'd need to find another solution, or live without a network connection until the responsible party could fix it. This included in at least one case a public network with a captive portal that was so broken that I resolved the DNS issue but couldn't then connect to anything. (I know tunnelling over DNS is possible, but I have never actually tried it)

As to your hotel networks, if you didn't tell them about it, how do you expect them to fix it at all? They may not have fixed it in a timely manner, but it may have helped the next person with the same issue?

Fedora and fallback DNS servers

Posted Mar 1, 2021 19:14 UTC (Mon) by gnu_lorien (subscriber, #44036) [Link]

"When I have had to set DNS settings manually on end devices I've had mixed results. Sometimes it would have worked, and I carried on"

This is the case that sytemd-resolved is implementing automatically for people that don't know how to set these manually or don't know which values to try.

"As to your hotel networks, if you didn't tell them about it, how do you expect them to fix it at all?"

That's not my problem. It's not my network. I'm not responsible for it.

"They may not have fixed it in a timely manner, but it may have helped the next person with the same issue?"

That's not my problem either. In this case I might suggest those other users use a GNU/Linux system with the default configured systemd-resolved fallbacks so that they're not at the whims of the broken DNS of a captive portal.

In the captive portal situation especially the economic incentive is the other way around. Any time I have to spend debugging their network and reporting this is time that I spent on their behalf where I'm paying them to fix their network. I happily give my labor free of charge to free systems. Proprietary ones do not get this privilege.