Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:

> What's wrong with 8.8.8.8? It's Google's public DNS, and for me, it
> always works.

That's fine - no-one is saying that you shouldn't use them if **you** want to.

What people object to is a hidden change, where something that **should** work one way (DNS lookups fail if no working servers are configured) has been changed invisibly (falls back to using something that some people may have objections to using). If you are happy using Google's servers, then put them in resolv.conf (or whatever it's been re-invented into this week) - problem solved.

For the rest of us, if we have no DNS servers in resolv.conf then we expect the system to respect that and not do DNS resolution. That is the **ONLY** correct behaviour.

What is absolutely, 100%, not acceptable behaviour is what's been done - to silently do something that no sane admin would expect, and many people have objections to doing. Even worse is when there isn't a mechanism for turning this off.

Comparison with (for example) NTP defaulting to using pool.ntp.org by default are disingenuous. For that, the settings are there in ntp.conf where they can be seen and easily changed. So that is completely different.