Re: pasta - Multiple DNS servers in resolv.conf

[Stefano Brivio <sbrivio@redhat.com>]

Hi Ben,

On Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:13:58 +0800
"Ben Woods" <pasta@ben.woods.am> wrote:

> Hi Stefano,
> 
> I have 2 DNS servers listed in the host /etc/resolv.conf - useful
> during a failure or maintenance of the primary server (even if
> fallback to the send server is much slower).
> 
> Can you please advise the best way to get podman containers using
> pasta to also have the 2 DNS servers?

There's no way to do that directly (and you _should_ not need it, I
think), because pasta doesn't really speak DNS (for simplicity /
security).

It can just forward what looks like DNS over TCP and UDP back and
forth, but it's not aware of single queries or responses, so it can't
really "fall back" to a secondary server. However:

> I note that if I don’t provide a —dns-forward option then the
> resolv.conf file is mapped through from the host, with an additional
> nameserver 169.254.1.1 added as the first entry above the ones in the
> host file.

...that will map to whatever resolver you have as first resolver on the
host. The other resolvers are there as well, though, so the fall back
should work exactly as it does on the host. That's why I think you
shouldn't need an explicit fallback handled by pasta.

We have / had an issue though, and it was just fixed by this series:

  https://archives.passt.top/passt-dev/20250417015543.457310-1-david@gibson.dropbear.id.au/

and somewhat described / analysed here:

  https://archives.passt.top/passt-dev/Z_3ukwUuG6kHwUW5@zatzit/

where we wouldn't send ICMP errors back to the container for
unresponsive DNS resolvers.

As a result, resolvers needed to time out instead of failing right
away, and if your application timed out before the resolver itself,
then you wouldn't see the fallback in action at all.

This fix will be available in the next release (probably in a couple of
days, might be a couple of weeks).

-- 
Stefano