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Comment by pravus | Hacker News Reader

The handling for the resolv.conf file is embedded in the libc and is larger than Linux. This whole issue is a failure of the Linux distribution community to come up with coherent standards for managing a simple text file on a system using DHCP. The solutions today are horribly complicated and appear to optimize for laptop users on simple, naive networks. I have no idea why I have to mess with any of this garbage on my servers.

No, we need to get back to software like it was in the early 2000s when people cared about consistent, long-term behavior instead of re-inventing everything because laptops.

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It makes sense to me. It solves the problem for simple networks and roaming users - so basically situations where things are expected to "just work" with minimal knowledge. It's our (sysadmins) job to configure the system correctly in other places. Especially in case of weird networks.

But simple networks and roaming users are perfectly fine with regular static file. I have no idea what user base this overengineered crap is catering but it seems equally useless both on (my) servers and laptops.

> roaming users are perfectly fine with regular static file.

If you want them to have broken DNS, then they are fine. If you want them to have working DNS, then not, regular static file is not fine.

A significant number of hotels do the login portals using their own DNS servers, do if you ignore those, you can't use that network. Pretty much every corp environment forces local DNS servers.

The web portal isn't the only way on to a hotel network, just the most convenient. The Nintendo Switch console doesn't support captive portals either, so I've gotten in the habit of dialing the front desk any time I stay at a hotel and asking to be transferred to the network team. You tell them you need a device whitelisted and provide your room number, duration of stay, and the MAC of any devices.

This may work in a large hotel chain, but not in a b&b which licenses their it solution from a 3rd party that never wants to speak with you.

resolv.conf never worked for roaming users. glibc famously only read it on application startup.

I disagree, this is historical baggage that /etc/resolve.conf is both configuration and runtime state and so any solution will be a little awkward.

If you only let one thing on your system own it: NetworkManager, dhcpcd, systemd-resolved, netplan, ifcfg, $you then it’s no issue.

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