could you please help me understand why am I getting Phoenix IP address when I ping my service? This site is fully behind Cloudflare CDN so I would expect it will serve me nearest datacenter which is Prague, Europe. Not Phoenix.
Ip I´m getting http://www.ip2location.com/104.31.80.242
thank you
This is an anycast address from CloudFlare, you can see it as CDN in the usage type in IP2Location. The exact server location depends to your own location. You could not use a geolocation database to detect the server location because there are many servers sharing the same IP address.
You can try to ping the IP address. If it is less than 50ms latency, then it should be very good.
Related
I am trying to get the big picture although my primary domain is not networking.
Some question's narrowed down for which I'm not getting enough/proper answers online
Is the IP that is resolved by the DNS server when I hit www.google.com is same as any of the Google router's Gateway IP?
Do bigger companies like Amazon do port forwarding?
If point 2 is true, I suppose they must be port forwarding with only 443 (https) port which means, to use multiple static IP across different data centers, they need to have that many routers. So, if they have N static IP address which resolves to a website, then they must be having N routers right? Is this a fair assumption?
A gateway IP refers to a device on a network which sends local
network traffic to other networks. it sits between you and internet,or other network . its like a watchman.
Question 1 : google.com has multiple ip addresses lets say then , Yes, that is possible, and will need to be two A records. This is called Round-Robin DNS. Clients will semi-randomly use one of the two addresses.
question2: yes port forwarding happens more often than we think. ALL VPC's (virtual private clouds like AWS , GCP , Azure etc) use this as they dont want to expose servers/internal resources to the internet.
depending on the port number , particular service is exposed to requesting client. lets say we want to make a website public , then we explicitly expose port 80(http) 443(https) so that web crawlers and users can see them.
Port forwarding, sometimes called port mapping, allows computers or
services in private networks to connect over the internet with other
public or private computers or services.
google https://www.google.com:444/ wont work because they did not expose port 444 on their cloud router
but https://www.google.com:443/ will work because the server corresponding to google.com has explicitly left it open.
How IP is resolved:
Step 1 - Send a Request to Resolve a Domain Name
When you type www.google.com into a browser, in order to load the webpage, your computer asks for the IP address. Computers do not know in advance where they can find the necessary information, so they try searching through the DNS cache and for available external source. proceed from lower level caches to root/main servers.
Step 2+3 - Try to resolve an IP Locally
Before going externally, your computer loads the local DNS cache database to see if you already requested the IP for that domain name. Every computer has a temporary cache with the most recent DNS requests and attempts to connect to online sources. if required record is present locally its called "CACHE HIT" and query stops.
However A computer’s local DNS cache database does not always contain the necessary data to resolve a domain name this is called a "CACHE MISS" . In that case, the request goes further to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and its DNS server.
Step 4 - ISPs Ask Outside DNS Servers to Provide an IP Address iff Cache miss
ISP DNS resolvers are configured to ask other DNS servers for correct IP address mapping until they can provide data back to the requester. These are iterative DNS queries.
When a DNS client sends such a request, the first responding server does not provide the needed IP address. Instead, it directs the request to another server that is lower in the DNS hierarchy, and that one to another until the IP address is fully resolved. There are a few stops in this process.
hierarchy looks like this (just for reference):
Root domain nameservers. Root servers themselves do not map IP addresses to domain names. Instead, they hold the information about all top-level domain (TLD) nameservers and point to their location. TLD is the rightmost section of a domain name... Root servers are critical since they are the first stop for all DNS lookup requests.
TLD nameservers. These servers contain the data for second-level domains, such as ‘phoenixnap’ in phoenixnap.com. Previously, the root server pointed to the location of the TLD server. Then, the TLD server needs to direct the request toward the server that contains the necessary data for the website we are trying to reach.
Authoritative nameserver. Authoritative servers are the final destination for DNS lookup requests. They provide the website’s IP address back to the recursive DNS servers. If the site has subdomains, the local DNS server will keep sending requests to the authoritative server until it finally resolves the IP address.
Step 5 - Receive the IP Address
Once the ISP’s recursive DNS server obtains the IP address by sending multiple iterative DNS queries, it finally returns it to your computer. The record for this request now stays cached on the hard drive. The browser can then fetch this IP from the cache and connect it to the website’s server.
ALL this happens in less than 1 second, most of the times. if you just registered a new domain it might take few hours to propagate this DNS cache globally hence newly registered websites do not show up sometimes.
About companies owning multiple IPs
Big companies have pool of IPs reserved for example 123.234.xxx.xxx which means a company has reserved 255*255 ips. they are mapped on a VPC(virtual private cloud)
and accessible vis a subnet masking and CIDR feature, like your EC2 instances on AWS
Is the IP that is resolved by the DNS server when I hit www.google.com is same as any of the Google router's Gateway IP?
For sure it should, but it is mostly a Google management question that only they will be able to answer right. The thing is that we must understand how DNS query's work for this.
Let's take a look of it:
Device A requests the IP address through a DNS query of the device B.
To do this, it uses the network port 53 (Domain) on which it will ask, depending on which DNS server is being used at the time, which is usually the home router. Then the router will ask the ISP's DNS server, which will respond with a cached response, or the query with another server on top of it if it does not have one; All this process is followed until a reliable cache response is reached or until the authoritative response server is reached, that is, the name server that manages the domain in question.
Only the authoritative response server contains the reliable information of which IP of the domain which is going to be reached.
I suppose that within Google's servers and its network they use Google's own DNS servers, which are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 where the DNS records are obtained and consulted by caching from many sites.
In general terms Google's IP will change depending on where you are, I made a DIG query to Google's authoritative servers, however, I received a result based on location to improve the route and loading time of the site which was 142.250.73.238.
Do bigger companies like Amazon do port forwarding?
Yes, they do. To handle queries with load balancers or similar and even for caching dns requests.
If point 2 is true, I suppose they must be port forwarding with only 443 (https) port which means, to use multiple static IP across different data centers, they need to have that many routers. So, if they have N static IP address which resolves to a website, then they must be having N routers right? Is this a fair assumption?
This has multiple answers. By the way, they actually can do a secure DNS query.
if they have N static IP address which resolves to a website, then they must be having N routers right?
They don't have to, but if they want to they can.
"Is this a fair assumption?"
No, the IP's doesn't depend on a router, the router only routes to a computer/server which can have multiple IP's. By the other hand, each thing (computer, server, etc... must have an IP which can be also a WAN IP).
I am now just starting to understand Httpcontexts and server side logic. Total beginner.
I have understood how to read the http requests from a client and get the remote IP etc.
I came across the hostname property.
I believe hostname and domain are completely different.
My undersanding is that stackoverflow is the domain name.
Given its widespread reach, stackoverflow can have multiple servers and hence multiple ip addresses.
So is there a way to determine to which server a client is requesting to in asp.net core 2.0?
You are correct that stackoverflow.com is a domain name. A domain name points to an IP address. That's called DNS. stackoverflow.com points to one single IP address not multiple. There's probably a load balancer at that IP address which then points you to an available server, which is internal you can't see that, but that's another story.
If you ping stackoverflow.com you get:
The whole point of DNS is to not use IP address but a domain name.
I'm not sure why you would want to see the IP. Maybe this stackoverflow question can help: Resolve HostName to IP
I'm a little confused about IP addresses.
I know that every web domain has an ip address.
Does the IP address represent the physical machine / host the website files are stored on?
Therefore when DNS lookup is performed, the domain's IP address is returned to the client. The client then uses this ip to contact the server that the web files reside on.
Is my understanding correct?
Many thanks
You are correct.
It is kind of like how some companies may say Dial PIZZAHUT instead of saying, Dial 74992488. PIZZAHUT is easier to remember, but you actually are dialling the number.
You're talking about HTTP protocol. Yes, FQDN (web domain) is resolved to IP address by DNS server. Client will connect to server IP address. Since you're probably using HTTP 1.1, HTTP request will contain also FQDN. This information is used by web server to perform several checks, like SSL certificate validation or Virtualhost management (several domains on a single IP address).
I'm making an XNA game. When I started, I had a broadband connection with real IP, so I could host servers of any kind without any problem, but now I don't have that connection any more and I want to be able to let players from outside my local network connect to my server again. How do I do that? How do big guys at studios do that?
Cheap option:
Configure your home router (it does have real, but probably dynamic, IP address) to forward connections on some port of your liking to your server on the local network. Read up on Network Address Translation - that's the trick routers use to hide a network behind a single routable IP.
Setup a DDNS account somewhere, so people can find your game server by name instead of changing IP address.
Expensive options:
Buy static IP package from your ISP (not always available).
Deploy your game at a Hosting Service.
Generally there are two ways to connect two clients:
Give each client other client's IP address and let them connect to each other.
Give each client a mid-server's IP address and tunnel the traffic through it.
First way assumes each client has a real IP address and they both can be a server to one another. Second way is for when one or both clients don't have real IP address.
I have a requirement that I believe may be impossible and wanted to confirm this with experts in this community.
A client wants us to configure a DNS server to point all non-whitelisted domains to an IP address of a server on the internet. This server should forward / redirect all non-http traffic to an IP address associated with the real DNS record as accurately as possible. However, for all port 80 traffic, it should intercept the traffic and forward to a web proxy. This could in theory be possible if we had a large block of public IP addresses that could intelligently route based on the sender's IP to the proper destination, but the engineering effort required there to keep the DNS request and subsequent requests to that same domain in sync would be immense. Not to mention we would be limited from a concurrency perspective.This is probably similar to how OpenDNS does their DNS+Proxying, but they only seem to do it for google.com. This needs to work for an arbitrary set of domains (potentially all of them).
Is the above approach feasible? If not, are there other ways this problem can be approached short of requiring specialized gateway hardware?
Ideally the system will minimize bandwidth usage & latency for non-http traffic without requiring anything besides DNS or firewall configuration. I realize we can forward all http traffic at the firewall level, but the client wants to avoid http requests to CDNs or media heavy sites as well as minimize deployment effort across disparate network configurations.
OpenDNS works by blacklisting instead of whitelisting
When a host is blacklisted, openDNS will resolve the name into their IP address, which in turn prevent the client from accessing the real IP.
In your case, looks like you need transparent proxy where you can route all HTTP traffic to your proxy server:
See :
http://www.howtoforge.com/dansguardian-content-filtering-with-transparent-proxy-on-ubuntu-9.10-karmic
This might not be exactly what you are looking for but take a look at my article "How To Setup A Transparent Content Filtering Proxy" in which I utilize OpenDNS's blacklisting capabilities.
You can do it using two pieces:
DNS resolver configured with *. pointing to IP A.B.C.D (wildcard)
NGINX reverse proxy listening on A.B.C.D that proxy request to the domain present in the Host header.