DNS Caching with Network Manager

I have been finding the DNS server on my router to be a bit flaky. It can take up-to 2 seconds to resolve a domain name and does no caching. This leads to slower network performance in applications that don’t do there own DNS caching.

There is an easy fix to this in Linux, just install dnsmasq, enable its DNS server and add 127.0.0.1 to your /etc/resolv.conf . dnsmasq then uses the nameservers specified in /etc/resolv.conf (other than itself) to lookup hostnames.

Unfortunately if you use Network Manager, it manages your /etc/resolv.conf and there doesn’t seem to be a way to add in custom entries on top of the ones Network Manager receives from DHCP. However, each time Network Manager brings up a network interface it runs the scripts in /etc/network/if-up.d/ . The script below prepends the nameservers 127.0.0.1 (dnsmasq’s DNS server) and 8.8.4.4 (Google’s open DNS server) to /etc/resolv.conf .

#!/bin/sh # Add dnsmasq caching server and google dns to /etc/resolv.conf set -e # No need to do anything on loopback. if [ " $IFACE " = lo ] ; then exit 0 ; fi # Only run from ifup. if [ " $MODE " ! = start ] ; then exit 0 ; fi cp /etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf.tmp echo nameserver 127.0.0.1 > /etc/resolv.conf echo nameserver 8.8.4.4 >> /etc/resolv.conf cat /etc/resolv.conf.tmp >> /etc/resolv.conf rm /etc/resolv.conf.tmp

Here are some step by step instructions to get it working in Ubuntu/Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install dnsmasq $ # Add `listen-address=127.0.0.1` to `/etc/dnsmasq.conf` $ sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart $ # Copy the above script into a file called dnsmasq-cache $ chmod +x dnsmasq-cache $ sudo mv dnsmasq-cache /etc/network/if-up.d/

Now when Network Manager brings up an interface it should enable use of dnsmasq’s caching DNS server. Take care when configuring dnsmasq to not enable it’s DHCP server unless you intend on using it. This can cause havoc on some LANs.

Now DNS records which haven’t expired should be super quick after the first access. On a simple test over crappy tethered internet I go from 952 msec to 0 msec for a query: