[Resolvconf-devel] Bug#691226: resolvconf: TRUNCATE_NAMESERVER_LIST_AFTER_LOOPBACK_ADDRESS default should be "no" due to another disadvantage

[Vincent Lefevre]

Package: resolvconf
Version: 1.68
Severity: wishlist

The resolvconf(8) says that the
TRUNCATE_NAMESERVER_LIST_AFTER_LOOPBACK_ADDRESS default is "yes"
because the only mentioned disadvantage occurs when the local
caching nameserver crashes, which is unlikely. I agree that a
crash is unlikely, but problems may also occur due to network
congestion. For instance, I could observe that with ADSL when
reloading a Firefox session, and this is not uncommon. It seems
that "external" DNS as used by BIND have a low timeout value
(I suspect because otherwise they would easily get overloaded),
thus often return an error in case of network congestion on the
side of the end user. I've never had such a problem with the DNS
of my ISP, so that such DNS (when they are known) are good as a
fallback.

Note: Ideally one should use the DNS of the ISP for external requests
to avoid the above problem; unfortunately, for a laptop that connect
to various networks, these DNS are not necessarily known, and many
DHCP servers return their own IP address and their DNS implementation
is sometimes broken when IPv6 is supported by the machine of the user,
giving obscure problems like:

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=457472

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=POSIX, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages resolvconf depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.46
ii  initscripts            2.88dsf-32
ii  lsb-base               4.1+Debian7

resolvconf recommends no packages.

resolvconf suggests no packages.

-- debconf information excluded