Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 99 posts

Re: Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

#21

Personally, I use nextdns on a paid plan (£17/year). Full control, can change to no logs, or logs stored in Switzerland. They have a free plan too

I do this.

I have my own resolver on my own server running unbound and it gets service from my paid nextdns account.

Sort of like having a pihole but it is available from anywhere and I don’t have to run a rpi…

Re: Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

#22
Given you only mention censorship/chilling effect and not privacy - why isn't 8.8.8.8 sufficient? Have there been instances of domains it censored and stopped resolving that I'm not aware of?

I guess I'm confused on the benefit (theoretical or practical) one would get by using that variety of resolvers. Is it just to prevent theoretical censorship at the DNS level?

Re: Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

#23

You could just run a recursive resolver yourself by using the root hints. You don't need to delegate your DNS queries onto a third-party resolver like Quad9. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/files

Thanks for that, appreciated. I'll be honest- I'm just a 'little guy' in the food chain so I always figured that doing something like that was for the ISP level folks One quick question though - After taking a quick skim of it the list seems to be extremely 'Western-Centric' (reference link https://www.internic.net/domain/named.root )

The canonical DNS system itself is extremely Western-Centric.

Re: Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

#24
post #22

Given you only mention censorship/chilling effect and not privacy - why isn't 8.8.8.8 sufficient? Have there been instances of domains it censored and stopped resolving that I'm not aware of? I guess I'm confused on the benefit (theoretical or practical) one would get by using that variety of resolvers. Is it just to prevent theoretical censorship at the DNS level?

Same with 1.1.1.1 (the case where archive.is used to not work was archive.is's nameserver purposefully being configured to return bad results to 1.1.1.1)

Re: Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

#25

If you already run your own DNS resolver, query the root servers directly. No need to trust DNS providers when you can do the same thing yourself.

based on the OP's description of yandex and what I presume to be their location it's not impossible that some time in the future unencrypted 53/udp traffic leaving and entering the country may be blocked or messed with

Re: Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

#26

You could just run a recursive resolver yourself by using the root hints. You don't need to delegate your DNS queries onto a third-party resolver like Quad9. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/files

Although querying the root servers directly is always unencrypted right? So your ISP can see and might manipulate all queries at will?

Re: Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

#27
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Then your experience differs greatly from mine (EU based). My usual mix of 'fastest anycast' upstreams’ are reliably black-holing a lot of .ru domains right now (Rightly or wrongly is a ‘nother question for a ‘nother day). P.S, YMMV and obviously does :)

Could you give a couple of examples of the black holing you've seen?

In slovenia, at least these two are blocked at the DNS level:

https://www.rt.com/

https://sputniknews.com/

Re: Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

#28
post #9

I know this isn't quite what your asking for, but one idea is to set up a Pi-hole + unbound: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/ Unbound is basically your own private DNS resolver and then Pi-hole lets you filter out whatever "junk" you don't want.

Unbound will also pre-fetch your most common lookups prior to the TTL expiring so it's probably even faster than querying a third-party resolver

Re: Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

#29
post #9

I know this isn't quite what your asking for, but one idea is to set up a Pi-hole + unbound: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/ Unbound is basically your own private DNS resolver and then Pi-hole lets you filter out whatever "junk" you don't want.

I don't know if it's an obvious question or not, but how does performance compare with your own unbound vs quad1/8/9? I imagine it's slower in general?

Re: Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

#30
Google DNS should at this point be considered harmful. Devs love to hardcode it in resolvd because 'user experience' but there's ample evidence its just analytics.

Quad 1 cloudflare is reliable doh but comes from a company with a history of bloviating nonsense about internet freedom only to eagerly capitulate to Twitter lynchmobs and blacklist a customer or ten.

https://dnscrypt.info/public-servers/ will give you a nice list of doh to try out. Ymmv however as many are sporadic.

Post reply on HN