[GRLUG] Persistant search domain

[Nathan Phillip Brink]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 09:41:48PM -0500, L. V. Lammert wrote:
> > We can't help you if we can't guess what's causing your search domain
> > to be updated. I suppose we could assume you're using a relatively
> > default installation of dhcpcd... but telling us your distro,
> > etc. would eliminiate some of this guessing.
> >
> Ahh, .. does nobody use WiFi? Selecting a different connection
> automatically rewrited resolv.conf based on the connection profile and
> DHCP information from the router.

When you say `WiFi', are you referring to a particular networking
package called `WiFi'? If so, could you point to its homepage (as
Googling `WiFi' gets all sorts of the wrong results).

On my laptop or elsewhere when I have used WiFi, I have used the
system wpa_supplicant daemon. Most GUIs probably wrap around
wpa_supplicant as I think it is the most popular (perhaps only?)
package for connecting to networks with modern WiFi security stuff
like WPA. When wpa_supplicant connects to a network, it tells the init
scripts via distro-specific hooks that the wlan0 device is ready for
configuring. This configuration gets handed off to dhcpcd.

> That would be common across the board.

You're still only describing high-level conceptual ideas about your
problem. Any solution is probably specific to what distro you're
using, etc.

> > If you're using dhcpcd, you can always edit /etc/resolv.conf.head or
> > /etc/resolv.conf.tail
> >
> Interesting, .. have to check that out - thanks! I had not seen any
> evidence they would actually be supported without an 'include' section in
> resolv.conf, a la bash.bashrc.local.
> 
> > If I am reading resolv.conf(5) correctly, the last search' line wins so
> > inserting `search my-domain.com' into /etc/resolv.conf.tail would force
> > `my-domain.com' to be your search domain.
> >
> It certainly would *IF* there were a way to set a persistant search domain
> (hint, the subject <g>!).

The point of resolv.conf.tail in dhcpcd's setup is to allow the
administrator to specify persistent resolv.conf configuration
directives. I didn't clarify this, but dhcpcd's normal behavior is to
take the information from the DHCP server and create a resolv.conf
file, prepend the contents of /etc/resolv.conf.head to that file, and
then append the contents of /etc/resolv.conf.tail to that file before
writing it to /etc/resolv.conf. Stuff in the .head and .tail is not
overwritten by what the server sends.

For example, on a machine where I run a bind daemon (just for fun,
mostly), I have `nameserver 127.0.0.1' in resolv.conf.head so that the
machine tries to use the local caching recursive DNS before the ISP's
DNS servers which dhcpcd places in the middle of /etc/resolv.conf.

So by a persistent search domain, I hope you mean a
statically-configured, constant, connection-nonspecific search domain?
;-)

-- 
binki

Look out for missing or extraneous apostrophes!
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