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Which Lemmy instances don’t rely on cloudflare? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 3 days ago by hddsx@lemmy.ca to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

…or GCP? …or AWS?

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

To repeat my comment here:

https://lemmy.today/post/41970730/20432766

I mean, it's easy to check whether a given instance is using CloudFlare.
$ host lemmy.world|head -n1
lemmy.world has address 104.26.9.209
$ whois 104.26.9.209|grep ^NetName
NetName:        CLOUDFLARENET
$
You can browse anonymously on any instance that permits doing so, so if you just want to browse during an outage, you can do that anywhere.

IMHO, having an account on a second Threadiverse instance isn't necessarily a terrible idea, not just because of CloudFlare outages, but because instances do have outages for various reasons. I have an account on olio.cafe (PieFed, not on CloudFlare) and on lemmy.today (Lemmy, not on CloudFlare) because I wanted to try out PieFed, and I have fallen back to that to post before if lemmy.today has issues.

That being said, I didn't intentionally try to avoid CloudFlare. I mean, they're used by a lot of major sites, and I don't expect them to have a lot of downtime. I mean, every Threadiverse instance has had downtime for some reason or another. I've had Internet outages, as well as electricity outages. Not all that common or usually an extended thing, but they happen.

[–] c0dezer0@programming.dev 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It seems you know your stuff.

Is there also a neat trick to find out if an instance rely on aws or gcp?

[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

CloudFlare is going to have someone talking directly to a CloudFlare IP address, so it's going to be visible.

AWS or GCP provide servers which might be behind something like CloudFlare. If they were deployed like that, I don't believe that there'd be a straightforward way to determine that that's where the server is hosted.

If it's directly-accessible, and not using a CDN like CloudFlare, then it'd work the same way as if you were checking whether they're using CloudFlare, just do a whois query on its IP address. I don't know a real instance offhand directly-accessible on AWS, but to grab a random AWS hostname and Google Cloud Platform hostname:

$ host ec2-23-20-1-1.compute-1.amazonaws.com.
ec2-23-20-1-1.compute-1.amazonaws.com has address 23.20.1.1
$ whois 23.20.0.0|grep ^NetName
NetName:        AMAZON-EC2-USEAST-10
NetName:        AMAZON-IAD
$ host 3.192.170.108.bc.googleusercontent.com
3.192.170.108.bc.googleusercontent.com has address 108.170.192.3
$ whois 108.170.192.3|grep ^NetName
NetName:        GOOGLE
$

For a real host, we can just ad-hoc scrape lemmy.world's instance list:

$ curl -s https://lemmy.world/instances |tr '}' '\n'|grep -o 'domain":".[^"]*'|sed 's/domain":"//' >threadiverse-hosts.txt
$ xargs <threadiverse-hosts.txt -n1 host -- >threadiverse-hosts-resolved.txt
$ grep "has address" threadiverse-hosts-resolved.txt |cut -d" " -f4|xargs -n1 host -- >threadiverse-hosts-reverse-resolved.txt
$ grep amazonaws.com threadiverse-hosts-reverse-resolved.txt|head -n1
75.184.193.54.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ec2-54-193-184-75.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com.
$ grep 54.193.184.75 threadiverse-hosts-resolved.txt|head -n1
c63b-77-100-144-83.ngrok-free.app has address 54.193.184.75
$

So there's the hostname of a real instance using AWS directly, c63b-77-100-144-83.ngrok-free.app.

$ host c63b-77-100-144-83.ngrok-free.app|head -n1
c63b-77-100-144-83.ngrok-free.app has address 184.72.44.51
$ whois 184.72.44.51|grep ^NetName
NetName:        AMAZON-EC2-7
NetName:        AMAZON-SFO
$