Ubuntu keeps sending DNS queries to daisy

Recently I noticed that my Linux desktop (Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS)  sends a DNS query to daisy.ubuntu.com about every 8 seconds. I do not want that, so I did some googling. Turns out that it is a known issue for more than 2 years.

What is happening

A service called whoopsie is actively doing those repeated queries to check if your system is on-line. A misconfiguration in the combination of network manager and dnsmask makes the query to always go to the internet instead of caching the query result for some time. There are several workarounds that stop this, see e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/whoopsie/+bug/991481/comments/19

On my desktop computer, I have statically configured my network, so it is not that useful to have the network manager active. I decided to permanently stop this service.

sudo -s
initctl stop network-manager
echo 'manual' > /etc/init/network-manager.override

That should make the query seems less often, it should prevent disabling caching. Unfortunately I see the queries as much as before. So, even as I do see some usefulness in reporting errors, the error reporting should only go on-line after I allow it to go on-line, and not every few seconds, so whoopsie has to go..

Removing whoopsie

The solution to this constant DNS traffic is to switch-off whoopsie. I decided that uninstalling it was the easiest way, and you can undo it by installing it again. So uninstall it, like this:

sudo dpkg --remove whoopsie

After that, no DNS queries to daisy.ubuntu.com anymore!