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Are you also facing the the 100mb upload limit when using cloudflare tunnel? Sometimes I want to upload a video from my phone will away from home but I can't and need to vpn


You have to disable Cloudflare proxy which is not an option with tunnels. It's technically against TOS to proxy non-HTML media anyway. I just ended up exposing my public IP.


> I just ended up exposing my public IP.

I considered doing that too. My main problem with it is privacy. Let's say I set up some sort of dynamic DNS to point foo.bar.example.org to my home IP. Then, after some family event, I share an album link (https://foo.bar.example.org/share/long-base64-string) with friends and family. The album link gets shared on, and ends up on the public internet. Once somebody figures out foo.bar.example.org points to my home IP, they can look up my home IP at all times.


It's another cost but running a reverse proxy from a VPS would solve this right?


It's crazy that both 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 where affected by the same change

I guess now we should start using a completely different provider as dns backup Maybe 8.8.8.8 or 9.9.9.9


1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 are served by the same service. It's not advertised as a redundant fully separate backup or anything like that...


Wait, then why does 1.0.0.1 exist? I'll grant I've never seen it advertised/documented as a backup, but I just assumed it must be because why else would you have two? (Given that 1.1.1.1 already isn't actually a single point, so I wouldn't think you need a second IP for load balancing reasons.)


I don't know of it's the reason, but inet_aton[0] and other parsing libraries that match its behaviour will parse 1.1 as 1.0.0.1. I use `ping 1.1` as a quick connectivity test.

[0] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/inet_aton.3.html#DESCR...


Far quicker to type ping 1.1 than ping 1.1.1.1

1.0.0.0/24 is a different network than 1.1.1.0/24 too, so can be hosted elsewhere. Indeed right now 1.1.1.1 from my laptop goes via 141.101.71.63 and 1.0.0.1 via 141.101.71.121, which are both hosts on the same LINX/LON1 peer but presumably from different routers, so there is some resilience there.

Given DNS is about the easiest thing to avoid a single point of failure on I'm not sure why you would put all your eggs in a single company, but that seems to be the modern internet - centralisation over resilience because resilience is somehow deemed to be hard.


> Far quicker to type ping 1.1 than ping 1.1.1.1

I guess. I wouldn't have thought it worthwhile for 4 chars, but yes.

> 1.0.0.0/24 is a different network than 1.1.1.0/24 too, so can be hosted elsewhere.

I thought anycast gave them that on a single IP, though perhaps this is even more resilient?


Not a network expert but anycast will give you different routes depending on where you are. But having 2 IPs will give you different routes to them from the same location. In this case since the error was BGP related, and they clearly use the same system to announce both IPs, both were affected.


In the internet world you can't really advertise subnets smaller than a /24, so 1.1.1.1/32 isn't a route, it's via 1.1.1.0/24

You can see they are separate routes, say looking at Telia's routing IP

https://lg.telia.net/?type=bgp&router=fre-peer1.se&address=1...

https://lg.telia.net/?type=bgp&router=fre-peer1.se&address=1...

In this case they both are advertised from the same peer above, I suspect they usually are - they certainly come from the same AS, but they don't need to. You could have two peers with cloudflare with different weights for each /24


Wasn’t it also because a lot of hotel / public routers used 1.1.1.1 for captive portals and therefore you couldn’t use 1.1.1.1?


Because operating systems have two boxes for DNS server IP addresses, and Cloudflare wants to be in both positions.


In general, the idea of DNS's design is to use the DNS resolver closest to you, rather than the one run by the largest company.

That said, it's a good idea to specifically pick multiple resolvers in different regions, on different backbones, using different providers, and not use an Anycast address, because Anycast can get a little weird. However, this can lead to hard-to-troubleshoot issues, because DNS doesn't always behave the way you expect.


Isn't the largest company most likely to have the DNS resolver closest to me?


Your ISP should have a DNS revolver closer to you. "Should" doesn't necessarily mean faster, however.


In case of Denmark, ISP DNS also means censored. Of course it started with CP, as it always does, then expanded to copyrights, pharmaceuticals, gambling and "terrorism". Except for the occasional Linux ISO, I don't partake in any of these topics, but I'm opposed to any kind of censorship on principle. And naturally, this doesn't stop anyone, but politicians get to stand in front of television cameras and say they're protecting children and stopping terrorists.

</soapbox>


Not just that. ISPs are often subject to certain data retention laws. For Denmark (And other EU countries) that maybe 6 months to 2 years. And considering close ties with "9 eyes" means America potentially has access to my information anyway.

Judging by Cloudflare's privacy policy, they hold less personally identifiable information than my ISP while offering EDNS and low latencies? Win, win, win.


I’ve had ISPs with a DNS server (configured via DHCP) farther away than 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8.


No, your ISP can have a server closer before any external one.


What’s your recommendation for finding the dns resolver closest to me? I currently use 1.1 and 8.8, but I’m absolutely open to alternatives.


The closest DNS resolver to you is the one run by your ISP.


Actually, it's about 20cm from my left elbow, which is physically several orders of magnitude closer than anything run by my ISP, and logically at least 2 network hops closer.

And the closest resolving proxy DNS server for most of my machines is listening on their loopback interface. The closest such machine happens to be about 1m away, so is beaten out of first place by centimetres. (-:

It's a shame that Microsoft arbitrarily ties such functionality to the Server flavour of Windows, and does not supply it on the Workstation flavour, but other operating systems are not so artificially limited or helpless; and even novice users on such systems can get a working proxy DNS server out of the box that their sysops don't actually have to touch.

The idea that one has to rely upon an ISP, or even upon CloudFlare and Google and Quad9, for this stuff is a bit of a marketing tale that is put about by thse self-same ISPs and CloudFlare and Google and Quad9. Not relying upon them is not actually limited to people who are skilled in system operation, i.e. who they are; but rather merely limited by what people run: black box "smart" tellies and whatnot, and the Workstation flavour of Microsoft Windows. Even for such machines, there's the option of a decent quality router/gateway or simply a small box providing proxy DNS on the LAN.

In my case, said small box is roughly the size of my hand and is smaller than my mass-market SOHO router/gateway. (-:


Is that really a win in terms of latency, considering that the chance of a cache hit increases with the number of users?


I used to run unbound at home as a full resolver, and ultimately this was my reason to go back to forwarding to other large public resolvers. So many domains seemed to be pretty slow to get a first query back, I had all kinds of odd behaviors from devices around the house getting a slow initial connection.

Changed back to just using big resolvers and all those issues disappeared.


Keep in mind that low latency is a different goal than reliability. If you want the lowest-latency, the anycast address of a big company will often win out, because they've spent a couple million to get those numbers. If you want most reliable, then the closest hop to you should be the most reliable (there's no accounting for poor sysadmin'ing), which is often the ISP, but sometimes not.

If you run your own recursive DNS server (I keep forgetting to use the right term) on a local network, you can hit the root servers directly, which makes that the most reliable possible DNS resolver. Yes you might get more cache misses initially but I highly doubt you'd notice. (note: querying the root nameservers is bad netiquette; you should always cache queries to them for at least 5 minutes, and always use DNS resolvers to cache locally)


> If you want most reliable, then the closest hop to you should be the most reliable (there's no accounting for poor sysadmin'ing), which is often the ISP, but sometimes not.

I'd argue that accounting for poorly managed ISP resolvers is a critical part of reasoning about reliability.


It is. If latency were important, one could always aggregate across a LAN with forwarding caching proxies pointing to a single resolving caching proxy, and gain economies of scale by exactly the same mechanisms. But latency is largely a wood-for-the-trees thing.

In terms of my everyday usage, for the past couple of decades, cache miss delays are largely lost in the noise of stupidly huge WWW pages, artificial service greylisting delays, CAPTCHA delays, and so forth.

Especially as the first step in any full cache miss, a back-end query to the root content DNS server, is also just a round-trip over the loopback interface. Indeed, as is also the second step sometimes now, since some TLDs also let one mirror their data. Thank you, Estonia. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44318136

And the gains in other areas are significant. Remember that privacy and security are also things that people want.

Then there's the fact that things like Quad9's/Google's/CloudFlare's anycasting surprisingly often results in hitting multiple independent servers for successive lookups, not yielding the cache gains that a superficial understanding would lead one to expect.

Just for fun, I did Bender's test at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44534938 a couple of days ago, in a loop. I received reset-to-maximum TTLs from multiple successive cache misses, on queries spaced merely 10 seconds apart, from all three of Quad9, Google Public DNS, and CloudFlare 1.1.1.1. With some maths, I could probably make a good estimate as to how many separate anycast caches on those services are answering me from scratch, and not actually providing the cache hits that one would naïvely think would happen.

I added 127.0.0.1 to Bender's list, of course. That had 1 cache miss at the beginning and then hit the cache every single time, just counting down the TTL by 10 seconds each iteration of the loop; although it did decide that 42 days was unreasonably long, and reduced it to a week. (-:


Windows 11 doesn't allow using that combination


Wasn't that the case since ever?


In general there's no such thing as "DNS backup". Most clients just arbitrarily pick one from the list, they don't fall back to the other one in case of failure or anything. So if one went down you'd still find many requests timing out.


The reality is that it's rather complicated to say what "most clients" do, as there is some behavioural variation amongst the DNS client libraries when they are configured with multiple IP addresses to contact. So whilst it's true to say that fallback and redundancy does not always operate as one might suppose at the DNS client level, it is untrue to go to the opposite extreme and say that there's no such thing at all.


I mean, aren't we already?

My Pi-holes both use OpenDNS, Quad9, and CloudFlare for upstream.

Most of my devices use both of my Pi-holes.


If you're already running Pi-hole, wny not just run your own recursive, caching resolver?


Can you explain more?


I tried it for a few minutes, I really like it But the lack of widget support is a deal breaker for me I usually just unlock my phone, see top stories directly and then click on one of the to open Materialistic (HN app, haven't been updated in a few years do it got delisted from the play store)


Yeah a widget is something that would be nice - I don't use them heavily myself so I guess that's a big reason for why they are not there right now. I do remember Materialistic having a OK widget.


Meta question : do you keep the archive.org link of the article in your favorite or did you manually look up the link before posting? Or maybe an extension that does that automatically?


What's wrong with CloudFlare? I recently discovered their free zero trust http proxy and really love it


They are a danger to the free and open internet.


They protect a lot of "objectionable" websites from DDoS, though.


[flagged]


That's not helpful. You said you wanted to help :)


Instilling doubt or question in something is often more practical in effecting change than immediately announcing every facet of your argument. Sometimes it’s more practical to coerce change by presenting an opportunity to question an assumed assumption.

Maybe someone will see my comment and start down their own rabbit hole to find a conclusion. That is more ideal than immediately assuming the details of my personal assumptions and conclusions.

:)


Meh. I think too much reliance on a single entity like CloudFlare isn’t good but your reply isn’t helping at all. I’d reconsider the approach it you really care about a decentralized internet.

@userbinator sets a good example elsewhere in this thread, imo.


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