The previous poster wrote: "But prior to Ubuntu 12.04, NM didn't start a local nameserver at all; no DNS lookups were done externally and /etc/hosts wasn't respected then either."
IMO this is not true. I've got no instance of dnsmasq running and entries in /etc/hosts are respected when e.g. letting Firefox (or any other application I've access to) resolve URLs. AFAIK /etc/hosts is in not directly linked to dnsmasq and it doesn't matter whether DNS lookups are done externally or not. The hosts mechanism is much older than dnsmasq. For backwards compatibility it has always been maintained as a first layer of resolving host names. IMO it is most unusual for a Linux distribution to provide a default configuration that does not respect /etc/hosts. To my knowledge there's no other operating system distribution (including Mac + Windows) that does so. Of course you are free to configure default Ubuntu as you like. But it would be great to respect published upgrade policy. What happened is that the upgrade to 12.04 silently changed the configuration in a way that broke all working /etc/hosts configurations. It is basic Debian/Ubuntu policy that such a thing should not happen without at least consulting the user and giving him/her a choice or a heads up. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to network-manager in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/993298 Title: Please make NetworkManager-controlled dnsmasq respect /etc/hosts Status in “network-manager” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: Since 12.04 NetworkManager uses the dnsmasq plugin by default to resolve DNS requests. Unfortunately the dnsmasq plug-in has --no- hosts, etc. hard coded [1] which means (among other things) that after the upgrade to 12.04 /etc/hosts will no longer be used to resolve DNS requests. This changes the prior behavior of NetworkManager without any visible warning to the end user. AFAICS there's no other way to work around this problem as to manually revert the change and disable the dnsmasq plug-in in the NetworkManager config, see [2,3]: "To turn off dnsmasq in Network Manager, you need to edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and comment the 'dns=dnsmasq' line then do a 'sudo restart network-manager'." This is of course not a bug in the NetworkManager which just behaves as intended. The problem is in the change of the configuration of the Ubuntu packaging which will probably leave many wondering why their /etc/hosts suddenly no longer works. This cost me considerable time to debug and probably is a usability problem for others, too. Maybe you could provide a more visible documentation than that in [3]? E.g., *including a comment in /etc/hosts that explains the change* and how to work around it would have saved me a lot of time. It would have automatically alerted me on upgrade as manual changes to /etc/hosts would then have triggered a prompt while leaving those users with standard /etc/hosts in peace. Probably similar problems arise with other disabled config files and could be alerted to the users? Thinking of resolv.conf, etc. [1] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/tree/src/dnsmasq-manager/nm-dnsmasq-manager.c, line 285 [2] i.e. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1968061 [3] http://www.stgraber.org/2012/02/24/dns-in-ubuntu-12-04/ To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/993298/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
