Linux complaints

Linux has always been Not Quite Unix, and many of the features and "improvements" reflect design trends by people who, in my opinion, don't quite get it. Unix isn't Unix any more.

This trend has evolved over the past three decades. BSD unix had a little of this (i.e. head(1), cat -v, etc.) but was purity itself compared to some of the things we see today.

One general trend has been the migration from a single configuration file to directories, daemons, and configuration programs offering essentially the same service. A good example is cron/crontab, though that is relatively painless, as these things go.

Today's frustration is with resolvconf, a system to keep /etc/resolv.conf up-to-date based on the states of the various interfaces. All I want is a fixed /etc/resolv.conf, with my own entries, based on me. resolvconf is in the way, and the man page is not useful. (Bad man pages are another screed: everyone needs Doug McIlroy as editor for their man page entries. GNU�s info(1) is a particularly unsuccessful attempt to replace the man pages.)

Clearly, I don't quite get it. There must be an easy way to do this, but I am still casting about, trying to pull the wings off of this particular fly.

This took way too much time, and numerous reboots---VirtualBox is my friend here, and ubuntu really does boot quickly. Many things in Linux have gotten a lot better than in the late 1990s, when Ken Thompson complained about it.

So, here's what I had to do to make this feature Go Away.

resolvconf -disable-updates

cp /dev/null /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf/base cp /dev/null /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf/head

rm /run/resolvconf/interface/*

remove all the dns- entries in /etc/network/interfaces

.... or ....

/etc/resolv.conf is a symbolic link into the resolvconf data resolution installation maintenance DNS resolution system. How about I remove the link, put in the actual file I want in /etc/resolv.conf, and move on?

This worked on one system, but not the other, where bad entries kept returning. I can't tell where it is storing it: a search through all of /run and /etc does not find one of the strings in the bad entry!

Kludge: /etc/rc.local

cp /etc/REALresolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf I am not proud of this, but this epic battle has taken way too much of my fading youth.

BTW, this is all in Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS

Now, what is in /etc/resolv.conf seems to get processed, but ends up as I originally set it.