On Sat, 30 May 2026 13:48:07 -0700 William Morder via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org wrote:
On Saturday 30 May 2026 12:53:57 E. Liddell via tde-users wrote:
On Fri, 29 May 2026 19:01:41 -0700
William Morder via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org wrote:
Is it possible for me to use OpenDNS or other DNS servers, and to avoid the default settings for my local network (which I do not control, which comes with the place), or am I stuck with somebody else's choices and configuration?
Have you tried the Arch Wiki's section on setting custom DNS servers for Network Manager?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NetworkManager#Custom_DNS_servers
It seems that Network Manager clobbers /etc/resolv.conf with DHCP-obtained information by default. If you want to use it, you'll have to conform to the way it does things.
E. Liddell
Well, now this at least explains why Network Manager keeps resetting the /etc/resolv.conf file to the default.
The problem is, what they tell me on this page does not at all correspond to what OpenDNS tells me on their pages, nor to most other pages about setting alternative DNS servers (i.e., "free" and "open" as opposed to the Big Guys).
The DNS guys may not be updating their documentation to keep up with best practices for more recent versions of Network Manager. While I have found out-of-date information on distro wikis in the past, I do trust them somewhat more than pages maintained by random services.
Also, this wiki page keeps bringing up systemd ... and I run Devuan, sysvinit. Am I missing something here? It has been awhile since I looked under the hood to examine how things actually work inside my system. I assume that Devuan has something else that corresponds to systemd for such matters as these.
I would have pointed you to the Gentoo wiki, which is primarily non-systemd, instead, but it doesn't have much info on Network Manager's underlying configuration files. I suppose the assumption is that if you're willing to mess around in configs in the first place, you're probably not going to install Network Manager.
I think Network Manager is supposed to be able to function without any other network control layer underneath it, but see if you have netifrc installed. That's the bottom network control layer on most Gentoo OpenRC (that is, non-systemd) machines, and if you set up a static configuration with it and get rid of Network Manager, you should be able to get more predictable behaviour.
(If you don't have netifrc, you may still have dhcpcd, which can often be convinced to behave if you smack it hard enough, but I've never tried to set up an alternate DNS server with it alone.)
E. Liddell