I think the world could use more alternatives to 8.8.8.8. Hopefully 1.1.1.1 will become more reliable as the years tick by.
(Do you use something besides 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1? If so, post it here! Collecting reliable DNS servers might be a niche hobby, but it's a fun one. I was going to suggest 9.9.9.9 aka Quad9, but apparently it comes with strings attached. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16728214)
Cloudflare doesn't support the DNS Extension that sends part of clients' IPs to the upstream resolver (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDNS_Client_Subnet). Cloudflare believes this is better for privacy.
Archive.is doesn't like this (because it prevents DNS-based CDN routing), and thus has a hardcoded exception to intentionally return bogus results to Cloudflare's resolvers.
Lack of EDNS only makes DNS based routing slightly worse if your CDN has a POP density similar-or-greater-than Cloudflare's.
Even so, why would an extra few dozen ms matter at all? Archive.is appears to be spindle-limited, is a client with marginally higher RTT an issue? The admin is silly.
This is a bad practice.
- In addition to not supporting EDNS, Cloudflare sends DNS requests from effectively random PoPs, so the recipient doesn’t know even the visitor’s nationality.
- The reason archive.is doesn’t like this is it makes them vulnerable to DoS attack.
Source and details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650
If you want to use the client's IP geolocation to resolve a CNAME to an edge server, this blocks you from doing so. You have to buy Cloudflare's products to get this benefit, and use their edge servers.
They forward every info that is required for cdn's to function, that's why no other cdn's are complaining.
See the statement of the CEO:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
Tldr:
> We publish the geolocation information of the IPs that we query from. That allows any network with less density than we have to properly return DNS-targeted results. For a relatively small operator like archive.is, there would be no loss in geo load balancing fidelity relying on the location of the Cloudflare PoP in lieu of EDNS IP subnets.
We are working with the small number of networks with a higher network/ISP density than Cloudflare (e.g., Netflix, Facebook, Google/YouTube) to come up with an EDNS IP Subnet alternative that gets them the information they need for geolocation targeting without risking user privacy and security.
99% of the time I just talk directly to the root servers from my home network and pre-cache the most popular places I visit. Unbound also supports DoH but most distributions of Linux do not enable that compile time flag in their Unbound package build and I have long since stopped compiling things as most distributions finally started using the right security options in their builds. I also have DoT running at home which the cell phone figured out on it's own.
I keep DoT Unbound DNS running on several VPS providers that also talk directly to the root servers just in case. Useful for cell phones. My ISP is a tiny community ISP and would never filter any results and DNS privacy is just one tiny piece of browsing habits. Until encrypted SNI is fully adopted by all SSL libraries and applications they can still see where I browse unless I am using my own Tinc VPNs or SSH tunneling.
Out of curiosity: Why, if you generally trust your ISP? Do you get worse performance using their DNS servers?
Speaking of stats, I can also see what IoT/Cell devices are requesting to keep an eye on their behavior and look for interesting patterns of DNS requests.
I have honestly never used the ISP DNS servers so I don't know what their performance is like. It's just muscle memory for me to set up my own home Linux router to be a DNS server. I highly doubt they could top the performance of Unbound and cron-jobs that request commonly used records on an hourly basis. I do know that my performance is better than talking to the DoH/DoT servers on the internet. The cached record response time is in microseconds vs 23ms for CF and non cached response time is generally between 50ms and 70ms vs 80ms to 160ms for CF not-cached.
Another nifty option in Unbound is to cache the "Infrastructure" records and to "Keep Probing" multiple nodes. This combines into a nice balance of speed and resilience especially if someones name server is having a moment but their status page is green.
unbound-control dump_infra|wc -l
1235
total.num.cachehits=20949
total.num.cachemiss=8010
total.num.prefetch=753
total.recursion.time.median=0.0698958https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-works-again...
I like the 300K requests per month free tier that nextdns.io has. Comes with plenty of filters.
Let’s say you want to block Peacock, and there’s a bunch of urls you want to block, each is it’s own individual rule. If you accidentally delete one instead of disable it, it’s gone. If you can remember the url you accidentally deleted, now it’s placed at the top of the list, out of order. There appears to be no log of changes you make. It would be nice to be able to add custom parental controls with sets/bundles of urls.
Also you can’t toggle or package ad blocking rules, only delete and add. Sort of the same interface complaint as above. I have to go in and delete four ad blocking packages every time I want to watch Paramount+. Then go find them again when I am done.
> The European public DNS that makes your Internet safer.
> A free, sovereign and GDPR-compliant recursive DNS resolver with a strong focus on security to protect the citizens and organizations of the European Union.
for example france: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/data-retention-france-illeg...
> In a decree made public today, French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne has extended the temporary retention of communications data of all citizens in France for another year. The blanket retention obligation concerns identity data (surname, first name, date and place of birth, postal address(es), e-mail address(es), telephone number(s)) as well as payment information, connection data (IP addresses, port numbers, identification numbers of users and their devices, date, time and duration of each communication, data on supplementary services and their providers)
they basically collect everything.
It isn't too complicated to set up and provides faster responses than external DNS servers, especially after the cache gets built up a bit.
[1]: Maybe only in EU?
I have set up Cloudflare DoH in my router, I block other popular DoH servers on my network and I also redirect any other DNS queries (UDP 53) to my router's DNS (which in turn uses Cloudflare).
And at least in my region (EU) I did not notice any issues with 1.1.1.1.
So, I don't go to archive.is anymore.
The site once used a tracking pixel as a poor mans ECS. The client IP address was inserted into the image name. Apparently the operator of the site explained this was used to achieve CDN-like functionality:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27501867
1. Perhaps we should be clear that "servers" here means open resolvers. These servers are of course not authoritative for any name, and generally recursion is slower than iteration, i.e., use of authoritative servers only (fee free to challenge me on this and I will share a citation, although I know this is true from own experiments). Thus "reliable" is perhaps ambiguous. Not all of them always return the same results. Some will return different answers, and not always for "load balancing" reasons. Some may be missing data entirely. Some will return wrong answers, e.g., pretending to be authoritative. Much DNS funny business on the internet today. I gather results from a variety of resolvers, from authoritative servers as well as other sources of DNS data, e.g., public zone files, scans and crawls, and I compare notes; I personally would not feel comfortable using one open resolver (third party DNS) as the source for all DNS data; I could not rely on it. As such, "reliable" is IMHO a loaded term if used to describe open resolvers.
From the makers of Windscribe VPN (Canadian)
I use the filter that blocks ads and malware 76.76.2.2 76.76.10.2
NextDNS
Running your own DNS resolver is super easy. It probably has the highest ROI of any self-hosted service, because it is so easy and inexpensive to do.
I recommend Unbound: https://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound
I think you can set rules per device in Pihole? I haven’t tried personally. I’ve only had set a few (3-4) sites manually allowed through the blocklists.
My nameserver, 8.8.8.8, and 1.1.1.1 are all about 25ms away from me. Mine is actually a few ms closer, but that will vary.
Bigger nameservers will have warmer caches, so first lookup might be a bit slower on my nameserver.
I presume the big nameservers are managed well under capacity, so load should not be significant.
All told, I cannot perceive any performance difference at all.
Found it the reverse chronological order (with timestamps being a smaller/lighter font, at least on mobile) to have caused extra thinking, which, for a status, seems undesireable.
I get wanting to expose the latest thing first, but the "top-posting" style seems intuitive. Perhaps, as a compromise, a status page would have a "Latest" block at the top, with the timestamp prominent, where the latest known status would be placed by whatever makes the updates, but the updates themselves are in the chronological order?