Otdfbt

In our environment (lots of CentOS 7 VMs), we routinely encounter the oft-discussed issue where name service lookups result in a 5 second delay as a request times out, even on "successful" requests. As others have tried, we've disabled IPv6 (not used in our internal environment), and it didn't completely resolve the issue. Searching through the forums, we found the suggestion to add "options single-request" to /etc/resolv.conf; this does seem to fix the problem, but manual edits to resolv.conf are routinely overwritten by NetworkManager.

I've searched around, but I can't seem to find a place in nmtui or nmcli to specify this so that NetworkManager knows to include the option when it rewrites the file.

Am I missing something obvious? Is there a way to set this somewhere else? Is there another, preferable fix for the issue?

You should be able to add

dns none
rc-manager unmanaged

to the [main] section of your /etc/networkManager/NetworkManager.conf file. This should stop it from over-writing your resolver configuration. You can check out the options in the NetworkManager.conf man page on your system.

I know the real solution is to fix the AD server that handles DNS requests (my network admin is begging for an answer as to how), but in the meantime, I've found a workaround.

In /etc/sysconfig/network, add the following line:

RES_OPTIONS="single-request"

You could add a script to your /etc/NetworkManager/dispatch.d/ folder though.

I have /etc/NetworkManager/dispatch.d/999-resolv-options (make sure it's owned by root, no setuid and chmod'ed to 700 though, according to documentation):

#!/bin/bash

IFACE="$1"
ACTION="$2"

# Don't bother doing anything if action isn't "up"
if [ "$ACTION" != "up" ]; then
 exit
fi

case "$IFACE" in
 eth*|wlan*|en*)
 grep -q "options timeout 1" /run/NetworkManager/resolv.conf &> /dev/null || echo "options timeout 1" >> /run/NetworkManager/resolv.conf
 grep -q "options single-request" /run/NetworkManager/resolv.conf &> /dev/null || echo "options single-request" >> /run/NetworkManager/resolv.conf
 ;;
esac

If your network interface names starts with something else than eth*, en* or wlan* then the case needs to be modified

This will check if options timeout 1 and options single-request exist, and if not, append them.

Note: the script appends to /run/NetworkManager/resolv.conf and not /etc/resolv.conf. On my Ubuntu 18.10 setup /etc/resolv.conf was symlinked to that file.

More info about the dispatch.d abilities in the Network Manager docs.