Ubuntu DNS Cache
I want to run a couple of apache virtual websites
at my Ubuntu 14.04LTS laptop. It has not bind/named
installed but to my surprise in /etc/resolv.conf
there is a reference to 127.0.0.1.
It means something bind like is running at my machine.
It turned out to be dnsmasq!
It has been installed along with Ubuntu
Network Manager.
Dnsmasq indeed is a cache and it has quite powerfull capabilities like
defining local DNS entries in /etc/hosts and return them as DNS responses.
This is exactly what I wanted. This way I could run a list of local sities
with apache httpd. Unfortunately when dnsmasq is called by NetworkManager,
it by default ignores /etc/hosts and there is no configuration to be tuned.
After a short digging in the web, I found a dirty hack which replaces
dnsmasq binary with a script and this way allows to consider entries
from /etc/hosts to be valid DNS records.
The other option is to get dnsmasq out of NetworkManager control and
install it independently.
Both solutions are described here.