macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal

adamamyl 342 points 178 comments March 19, 2026
gist.github.com · View on Hacker News

One of those 'woke up to MacOS updates' and finding none of my dockers are reachable via dnsmasq (which I use), and low and behold, an update silently breaks custom dns resolution. Hopefully Apple will listen to the bug report I've made. Hold off on updating if you use this…

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

adamamyl

Before others jump in: I already use Linux (and used to run FreeBSD as my desktop operating system).

Congeec

If you have ScreenTime turned on. Port :8080 is occupied and your ubuntu apt-get in a docker build gets hash mismatch because they obviously modified packets. Let alone I am having another issue of unable to delete a private key in Keychain Access. The whole macOS thing is amateur

binaryturtle

I run a setup like that on my (outdated) Yosemite machine to provide multiple private TLDs for local deployment/development needs. I set that up in like 2014? Even back then it was known already that the quick /etc/resolver way was the deprecated way to do things. So I guess they finally killed that feature off? The proper (more awkward) way is to use scutil directly (which then stores the settings in some binary plist somewhere, I assume). Maybe try this and see if it still works afterwards?

himata4113

Still wishing for the day apple is split into the hardware and the software company. I want their silicon, but I will never use their (arguably terrible) operating system. If I can't run my own kernel and kernel modules then it's a device that I don't own. Firmware is alright in some cases, but my laptop next to me is running core boot just to prove a point.

mrbuttons454

Papercuts like this are why I moved away from macOS. I will say, I don't love the use of LLMs to write these bug reports. It's probably fine if reviewed, but at least review for things like "worked on macOS 25", which obviously didn't exist. If that wasn't caught, how sure are you that the rest of the report is accurate? We all want the bugs fixed, but people are going to start throwing out the obviously LLM written reports rather than have to validate each claim, since the author probably didn't.

neilsharma425

Has anyone found a working workaround yet? I use dnsmasq for .local dev routing and held off updating after seeing this but curious if there is a viable path forward short of waiting for Apple to patch it.

justsomehnguy

Solved this type of shenanigans some years ago with this. New-UnboundInterface.sh - linux/rhel-like specific # create a bridge interface for Unbound # because Docker... IFTYPE=bridge IFNAME=unbound0 IPADDR=10.53.0.1 IPADDR6=fd53:fd53:fd53::1 nmcli connection add type $IFTYPE ifname $IFNAME nmcli connection modify $IFTYPE-$IFNAME ip4 $IPADDR/32 nmcli connection modify $IFTYPE-$IFNAME ipv4.dns $IPADDR nmcli connection modify $IFTYPE-$IFNAME ip6 $IPADDR6/64 nmcli connection modify $IFTYPE-$IFNAME ipv6.dns $IPADDR6 nmcli connection up $IFTYPE-$IFNAME firewall-cmd --new-zone=unbound --permanent firewall-cmd --zone=unbound --permanent --change-interface=$IFNAME firewall-cmd --zone=unbound --permanent --add-service=dns firewall-cmd --reload 00-localinterface.conf # should be placed in /etc/unbound/conf.d # bind to a specified IP address, allow access server: interface: 10.53.0.1 interface: fd53:fd53:fd53::1 access-control: 10.53.0.1/32 allow access-control: fd53:fd53:fd53::1/128 allow 91-allow-docker-containers.conf # allow queries from the Docker "bridge" server: access-control: 172.18.0.1/16 allow

hk1337

I've been using macOS since OS X Tiger and I wasn't aware of this feature.

Razengan

It also seemingly broke removing Safari cookies on a per website basis, something I often used to stop Google's scummy tracking across all their services if you just want to sign into YouTube.

Drupon

FYI the phrase is "lo and behold" Thank you for the heads up.

lapcat

> https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/feedback/22280434 (that seems to need a login?). All Feedbacks that you file are private to your own Apple Account.

ramon156

Bit off-topic. I mostly use Linux and I'm of the opinion that it's miles better than Windows, but I don't fully understand why people say MacOS looks bad? Ignoring the current Tahoe mess, MacOS felt relatively polished. I'm purely talking about UX here, as the OS is evidently buggy. The most popular Gnome themes are a re-impl of MacOS, so I can't be the only one.

ProllyInfamous

I am not familiar with dnsmasq at all (is this machine-local?), but absolutely love my PiHole hardware — you can even create rules which intercept hard-coded-IP DNS request and/or httpsDNS. You can also hard-code/intercept .TLD to local service IPs. Programs like LittleSnitch never really seem like "enough" for me, because the computer has to boot before DNS filtering comes online. It also has the design error (IMHO) of pre-resolving IP addresses before clicking Accept/Deny(all). A great blockrule for your personal firewalls would be to ban (at top level) icloud.com, apple.com, &c; system updates can then be performed manually using guides like < http://www.mrmacintosh.com >. Of course: this breaks everything (in exactly the way I prefer to compute).

JimDabell

*.localhost works out of the box doesn’t it? You don’t need dnsmasq at all to have multiple hostnames pointing to 127.0.0.1.

MoonWalk

A couple iOS versions ago, Apple broke self-signed certificates... crippling mobile development by preventing the use of HTTPS to communicate with a local server. It makes you wonder why they were messing around in these areas at all at this point.

yearolinuxdsktp

Apple container CLI configures internal domains (`container system dns`) by adding an internal resolver and it worked for me when I specified an actual domain previously handled by external DNS and it showed up as a custom resolver. Here’s a GitHub comment showing someone on MacOS 26 with a `.test` domain, which you claim is broken: https://github.com/apple/container/issues/856#issuecomment-3... —- maybe you are configuring it incorrectly.

philo23

It's not quite the same, but I've moved to using *.localhost for all my local web dev work. All modern browsers will resolve *.localhost to 127.0.0.1 internally. No need to setup any DNS resolvers or edit your hosts file. But that only really helps you when you're dealing with websites in a browser, and when you want the address to resolve back to your local machine. So it wont help you with other programs like python/wget/etc or any calls you make to getaddrinfo()

intrasight

Honest question: How would this affect me and the vast majority of macOS users who use the device for media consumption and productivity applications? Next question: what reason would Apple have to make a change that would interfere with developers using their operating system?

lysace

> Ah, the joys of waking up to find the Mac's done an overnight upgrade Wait, it does that (from 15 to 26) without user interaction?

alin23

macOS 26 has to be the most breaking version so far, its problems and intended breaking changes making my app dev life so hard this year. Just to name a few: - Reference Presets no longer allow setting arbitrary SDR nits, making it impossible to natively unlock 1600nits of brightness on MacBook Pros or 2000nits on Studio Display XDR which breaks my Lunar app [0] (this seems to be intended, no idea what hurt Apple that they had to block this under SIP) - The orange microphone dot indicator and its very colored friends can no longer have their brightness changed for dimming them, which made my YellowDot app useless [1] (I guess this is for privacy, I still think this could have a setting guarded under TouchID like Accessibility Permissions works) - Floating non-titled windows don't accept mouse events (thankfully this got fixed) [2] - Gamma table changes don't work on MacBook Neo and M5 Pro/Max which breaks Sub-zero Dimming and dimming external monitors that don't support DDC (thankfully, Apple is looking into it) [3] - The resizing area thing on very rounded windows which drives everyone nuts, I had to add custom resize handlers to some of my windows - The `com.apple.SwiftUI.Drag-` temporary file paths that get generated for any file that gets dragged from a drag&drop handler which makes it impossible to get to the original file when dragging images from Clop [4] or file shelf apps like Yoink, Dropover etc. - NSImage returning different pixel count for .size than what the image actually has, breaking workflows that depended on that to determine the image DPI [0] https://lunar.fyi/#xdr [1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/YellowDot/issues/18 [2] https://developer.apple.com/forums//thread/814798 [3] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/819331 [4] https://lowtechguys.com/clop

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