I’m running FreeIPA in an OpenStack lab. I don’t control the DHCP server. When a host renews its lease, the dhclient code overwrites the nameserver values in /etc/resolv.conf. To avoid this, I modified /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf

interface "eth0" {
 prepend domain-name-servers 192.168.187.12;
}

This makes sure my custom nameserver stays at the top of the list. Its a small hack that is perfect for developer work.