this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Systemd-networkd (not systemd the init system) defaulted to the google DNS servers when:
That is indeed a serious issue worth bringing up decades later.
The main thing that turned it into a serious issue (five years ago) rather than just a stupid thing to joke about was that Poettering refused to admit that it was a mistake. It only got fixed because downstream packagers of systemd patched it out.
Why would he? It never was an issue.
It's just one more annoying little thing to go on the big list of items to be corrected when setting up a systemd-equipped system, but more importantly believing that it's acceptable to just leave it there demonstrates extremely poor judgement to a degree that makes many of us doubt the trustworthiness of the entire project. Perhaps in 2013, or whenever the decision was initially made, substantial numbers of people were sufficiently clueless as to think that adding in the possibility of inadvertently having your system quietly direct all its DNS queries to Google was better than the more obvious alternative of not doing so, but after everything that's gone down since then it's quite hard to imagine why anyone would stick up for such a bizarre point of view today.
Where are those "many of us"?
It is what the CI uses for testing. If several layers of people decide to not do their job and you have no hardware in your network that announces the DNS servers to use like basically everybody has, then those CI settings might leak through to the occassional user. Even then, at least there is network: Somebody that can't be arsed to configure their network or pick any semi-private distribution will probably prefer that.
Absolutely no issue here, nothing to see.
Were they really? Or were they told "change it if you don't like it"? Genuine question, and it would make some difference.
But in either case I'm sure not all of them did, and failing that it is all down to the one person (or worse, one team of people) administering the system. Badly configured networks resulting in DNS problems is not exactly rare, but that is beside the point. It's clearly wrong no matter how uncommon is the situation that makes it materially detrimental.