I recently tried to enable system-wide DNS over https on Fedora. To do so I had to to some research and found out how comfusing it is for the average user (and even experienced users) to change the settings. In fact there are multiple backends messing with system DNS at the same time.

Most major Linux distributions use systemd-resolved for DNS but there is no utility for changing its configuration.

The average user would still try to change DNS settings by editing /etc/relov.conf (which is overwritten and will not survive reboots) or changing settings in Network Manager.

Based on documentation of systemd-resolved, the standard way of adding custom DNS servers is putting so-called ‘drop-in’ files in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf.d directory, especially when you want to use DNS-over-TLS or DNS-over-https.

Modern browsers use their buit-in DNS settings which adds to the confusion.

I think this is one area that Linux needs more work and more standardization.

How do you think it should be fixed?

  •  Mikelius   ( @Mikelius@lemmy.ml ) 
    6•1 year ago

    This isn’t really a “Linux” problem. Calling it a Linux problem implies all distros do the same thing out of the box because it’s a part of the core system. Systemd has a file, /etc/systemd/resolved.conf which has one line DNS= that you can add the servers you want. It’s as simple as that. If you’re using Dnsmasq for DNS instead, you’d edit the Dnsmasq file. If you’re not using my of those (i.e. you removed systemd-resolved, Dnsmasq, etc) then you can just edit the /etc/reeolv.conf directly without worry of it being overwritten.

    While many distros come with systemd out of the box, not all of them do. For example, I use Gentoo with rc and after editing my resolv.conf, never had to worry about it again unless I decided to install a custom DNS software on it later.

    I read many replies to your post as “DNS software shouldn’t be allowed to change DNS settings” for the most part, and that doesn’t quite make sense to me. If it’s a problem, remove said software. Browsers are definitely annoying in the DNS front, I won’t disagree with that. Fortunately, they allow you to turn that off though.