Roaming, and libresolv being stuck in the 1980's mindset

[Björn Persson]

Philip Prindeville wrote:
> I recently opened a bug with glibc because persistent programs (like
> Thunderbird, etc) don't seem to handle roaming onto different
> networks very well.
> 
> Or rather, they rely on libresolv which opens /etc/resolv.conf at
> startup and then ignores changes to the file for the rest of the time
> the process it is linked to is running.
> 
> This might have been fine for desktop tower computers in the 1980's
> (though even then we had PPP and dynamic network settings), but we're
> in the era of pervasive laptops with internet connections and you're
> settings are going to be volatile.  Period.

On the other hand those laptops are moving around in a rather hostile
environment, so they really ought to start doing DNSsec validation
locally as soon as possible, preferably several years ago. That means
that libresolv will only ever query the resolver daemon on the local
host, and has no need to check for updates to resolv.conf.

Some installations may be able to rely on a trusted DNS server doing
the validation for them, but then their resolv.conf is static, so again
there is no need to check for updates.

Björn Persson
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