Network configuration future

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, 2012-09-07 at 16:44 -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> Dan Williams wrote:
> > 'man NetworkManager' is a good place to start here, which leads you to
> > NetworkManager.conf, which leads you to:
> > 
> > dns=dnsmasq
> > 
> > which with 0.9.6 and any options you put into custom configuration
> > in /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d, should do exactly what you want.  The
> > local caching nameserver functionality has actually been around for
> > quite a few years.  Also, on per-connection basis, NM allows appending
> > custom search domains to the list returned by the DHCP server, or as
> > you've found you can hijack the dhclient config files to do what you
> > want too.
> > 
> > As always, more documentation would be awesome; we've got a wiki but we
> > can also add stuff to a FAQ in git too.
> 
> Would this not be more beneficial if this option was visible in the
> Gnome network settings UI? What if "Network proxy" was changed to
> "Network defaults" and a dns= option was added to the existing proxy
> options?

Honestly, no.  And here's why.  First, we should probably be using a
caching dns server by default.  But really, this isn't an option that
should ever be in a UI, because it should Just Work and you shouldn't
have to care about DNS.  Just like we should be auto-detecting proxy
servers if we can, instead of making you enter that all manually.  If
you know you want a local caching DNS server, then you'll probably know
how to turn it on.  If you don't know what one is, then we should be
setting up the right defaults for you.  A distro that caters towards
"easy to use" should probably just drop a default NM config file with
dns=dnsmasq into /etc, while ones that cater more towards sysadmins
would not.

Dan