NMControl: Primary/Secondary DNS [closed]

[biolizard89]

How are you detecting the correct secondary DNS server for the Windows settings? I'm unaware of a way to have the primary DNS be static but the alternative DNS be DHCP. If the user has to manually enter their alternative DNS, how is this better than the status quo?

[phelix]

OK, turns out with this hack some things in the system background actually do happen so it does not work. What a pity.

This means that people running Windows versions before 8 will have to change both system DNS settings and NMControl config files and also make sure NMControl is always running (or change system DNS settings back). This is quite ugly. Hopefully most Windows users will switch to Windows 10 soon.

[biolizard89]

OK, turns out with this hack some things in the system background actually do happen so it does not work. What a pity.

This means that people running Windows versions before 8 will have to change both system DNS settings and NMControl config files and also make sure NMControl is always running (or change system DNS settings back). This is quite ugly. Hopefully most Windows users will switch to Windows 10 soon.

There might be tricks you can do where a BAT script sets DNS to DHCP, grabs the IP with ipconfig /all, sets the NMControl config accordingly, runs NMControl, and sets the DNS to 127.0.0.1. Then when NMControl exits, the BAT script would reset DNS to DHCP. This would work for a lot of use cases, but if the user switches networks then they would need to rerun the script, and if the user doesn't use DHCP this would need modification. Maybe NMControl could automatically rerun that script if it failed to contact the upstream DNS server.

I might try to implement this if I have some free time. But, generally speaking, I think it's okay to require Windows users to be on 8+ for things to work smoothly, at least in the short term.