Change:
- -k - --cache-size=1000 - --no-negcache <ins> - --dns-loop-detect </ins> - --log-facility=- - --server=/$DNS_DOMAIN/127.0.0.1#10053 - --server=/in-addr.arpa/127.0.0.1#10053

Discussion:
Is this a BUG REPORT or FEATURE REQUEST?: What happened: If hosts points to a local DNS server, or if it contains the cluster's DNS server (to enable looking up services from host), it'll cause DNS loop which can effectively disable kube-dns or make it very slow. What you expected to happen: At least, kube-dns should detect localhost or cluster DNS server entries in and not send queries to them. How to reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible): Use a system with local cashing DNS server, or add cluster's DNS server address to hosts Anything else we need to know?: According to documentation, adding should make dnsmasq detect that and disable the upstream DNS server which cause the loop. It should prevent DNS from becoming unresponsive in the first case (a better solution is to extract real upstream servers, which probably cannot be done for every configuration); and for the second case it should skip sending queries to itself and send to real upstream servers.
/sig network
Could you describe the use-case more? If the host's contains cluster DNS server and some other upstream server - like 8.8.8.8, will services lookups work reliably from the host? If the services lookup goes to the 8.8.8.8 server, it will return NXDOMAIN. If it hits the clusterDNS server, only then it would work, correct?
Also ref If the first server returns NXDOMAIN, the second server will not be tried. How do you make both cluster DNS name and non-cluster DNS name resolvable on the host?
If cluster DNS server comes before a real DNS server, it works fine. Also note that what man page says is the glibc (or libc) behavior, not other users (e.g. dnsmasq sends its queries to any one of them, but can be configured to query them in strict order ( flag), or to query all of them (). Anyway, consider when cluster DNS server comes before the real server: cluster DNS queries, the cluster DNS server responds with the IP of the cluster or pod. external names, the query is sent to cluster DNS server. It doesn't find the name, so it tries to send it to upstream DNS servers; which in my example are cluster DNS server itself and an external DNS server.

If dnsmasq sends it to external DNS server, it'll receive the answer and can serve the query. If it sends it to itself, there is a loop and the same process happens again until dnsmasq decides to query the other server (which might not happen!). WIth flag, when dnsmasq sends the query to itself, it'll recognize the loop and will remove its own address from the list of upstream DNS servers, so it'll always send external names to the external DNS server from now on.
Thanks for the explanation. I believe it might work with explicit configuration. Though adding a flag to upstream for fulfilling a not quite common use case seems a bit odd to me. Have you thought of configuring upstream DNS servers via kube-dns config [1] such that it will not send request to itself at all? [1] -
Note that the flag has two use cases, the other one is prevent kube-dns breakage when upstream DNS server is a local one (e.g. If you deploy to Ubuntu, which has local caching DNS server by default (e.g. in 18.04, it is systemd-resolved and contains 127.0.0.53)). Actually I guess there are a number of DNS related issues which might be solved by this flag too. So, while this flag will not make kubernetes magically find real upstream dns servers in such cases, it prevents kube-dns crash; which has caused frustration and some time for me to discover. So, either kubelet should error out and exit if the given contains a local address, or such flag should be used by kube-dns to prevent DNS loops. And, IIRC, the only reason that cluster's DNS server is not to host, at least by kubespray, is mentioned to be host specific in the docs. So, my use case seems to be an ideal one and it would be the default one if it was easy to setup for different platforms. About using kube-dns config, no. We're going to provide automatic kubernetes deployment for many environments, and so we don't know the upstream DNS servers upfront, and we don't want to hard code it. We want it to be the DNS servers used in the target network. So, configuring a specific upstream DNS server is a no-go.