Can you explain this DNS thing further, please?

I start with what I understand. DNS stands for domains name system, which means a huge database of domain names and their IP addresses. When I ask for a website, DNS tells my computer / browser which IP addresses to look for, to reach the website.

At home, I have Pi-Hole and Unbound. The first one censors DNS addresses by not including domains that serve advertisements. It can work with various DNS providers, including those from Google or Cloudflare. Unbound allows me to self-host DNS database, periodically fetching it from somewhere. That way my ISP may not see … here I’m not sure what, DNS lookups? It sees which IPs I reach, so I assume there’s no big difference, if they’d want to know which resources I reach for. Frankly, I don’t understand this solution entirely, perhaps unbound is for something different. I used Pi-Hole without it for years, only recently I added unbound, because it was quite easy to do with DietPi distro.

Cloudflare actively promotes their WARP service, for people to use their DNS servers. They have three options, four ones, three ones and two, three ones and three. My guess is they theoretically can analyse these DNS lookups for some reason. (E.g. by partnering with three letter agencies, doing some service for them.)

What is DNS in the context of my website being registered with them? When I reach to my website, or any other website registered with them, what would happen? Isn’t the record everywhere already? I cannot understand what this means in this (different, isn’t it?) context.

The rug pull scheme ‘now you pay us for DNS too!’ seems unlikely, for some reason. If it’s no different from what they provide as a free service. If it’s something else, I assume you can migrate to any other registrar, unless you’re too heavy into their ecosystem.

On a personal note, I’m not too heavy into their ecosystem, I hope. I have a couple of static websites hosted for free with Cloudflare Pages. Plus I have a bare metal file server with images which is shared to the internet with Cloudflare Tunnel. I’m nobody with a few readers, tens of posts and hundreds of images, and I chose this architecture because I don’t understand how to properly self-host my blog on a residential connection (meaning dynamic IP behind a CG-NAT or what it’s called). When I do, I may drop them in favour of a simpler architecture. But also I was curious how it works.

So, saying all this, I still don’t understand what this them being an authoritative registrar means in this context. Perhaps I lack some web dev skills to understand that properly. When I had my domain with Squarespace, they allowed more than Cloudflare, but I lack understanding to properly formulate that, to even understand what it was. I think I could host my top level domain with Cloudflare Pages only when they are my registrar, while having those Pages on a subdomain was trivial even with a different registrar. If I remember that correctly now, I might’ve been confusing some things here.

Thanks for your previous explanation, it was quite informative.

Thanks! I haven’t thought of com as being the real TLD, actually!

Thanks! It’s a bit more clear now.

To contribute to the discussion, I remembered that with Squarespace (my previous registrar), I had unlimited redirects, which I used heavily. I am not really sure about the unlimited part, perhaps that was hidden somewhere in the interface, and they have limits, and I just never saw them. But I remember Cloudflare communicated I have like 10, so I decided to not use it for nice-to-have but not really needed things. E.g. I used a subdomain for a blog, and created redirects for typical misprints in my name. Was handy, but not really needed. I should have document this, but I was too busy at the time, and now, almost a year later, I don’t really remember. There were differences with Cloudflare and Squarespace.

My first registrar was Google domains. As always, they killed the business. And sold it to Squarespace. I’ve been their customer for a year or two, nothing bad I can say, except the price was about 1.5 or even 2x of that from Cloudflare for com domain, so I migrated there. I have no deep understanding of the nuances, so I cannot say whether Cloudflare is a bad actor. At least I trust them to not elevate the price, as it’s not their primary business, sell domains.

I see that, but what does it mean in practice?

I have my domain with Cloudflare too, and at this point, I’m not aware of these DNS servers. Can someone explain it a bit? I know what DNS is, but I don’t understand what’s the use case for having them elsewhere. I’m not to argue, just didn’t know where to register a domain, so I went with them. I’m concerned with the future of the domain either, but don’t understand the issues at this early point.

Which countries do you mean? In Ukraine more likely you won’t be welcome, but even that can be different if you’d learn the history (not the bullshit you’re fed in Russia), culture, and language. Baltics won’t like you, I guess, but again, if you won’t push ‘great’ Russian culture (like three writers over three centuries) on them, you’d be fine. At some point, you’d have to understand that this is precisely nobody likes Russians. If you’re open to the world and don’t mind embracing diversity, languages and cultures, you’d be ok. Bonus, much easier to a girl, if you’re a girl. However, a friend in Stockholm was very suspicious of his Russian girlfriend, thinking she could be with him purely based on things not really related to the relationships. Which is, well, understandable.

Also, you might move different direction, like Asia. I think people mostly aren’t in the context of the war, and unless you’re pushing them into Russian, I believe you’d be fine. Especially if you’d be open about you not supporting the country of your origin, but being afraid to stand against the regime. Leaving, you’re weakening Russia, which is good for everyone, even Russians. Russia must lose the war to become a country (hopefully countries, plural) that won’t be a threat to everyone. Otherwise, it would be even worse for everyone.

It’s even worse than advertisement. As it’s useless.

Neo, wake up!

I wonder what are peanuts in this context. It sounds like a great server!

I see French bloated my system to the fullest!

Oh, thanks, I missed it. It’s a very long thread. I’ve read only the first 40 messages so far, so I cannot really comment on that. But here is a nice advice from there:

FWIW It is possible to run Syncthing via Termux — it’s not as integrated but it runs fine.

What is wrong with the fork from F-Droid? I use it. I see no difference with the original, I’d say it’s even better. If you don’t trust them for some reason, why discard Syncthing as a project? I assume it can be built then. But I have no idea how.

By the way, I’m happy to use Sushi Train on iPhone. Works very well, and is lovingly polished. Now Syncthing is a centrepiece of my workflow to sync my files.

The easiest way would be getting the cheapest SSD (even 30 GB is enough for most distros), swap your current disk with it, play around, and return where you were, if you don’t like anything.

Have you tried a non-tech solution, like putting the drives into some noise absorbing materials, or isolating the sound with the hard case, things like that? That may sound not really obvious, but my guess is that you can at least get some noise off with a solution like this.

I won’t go with SSDs for a NAS as it’s very expensive. But if money of no concern, that Beelink thing looks impressive.

Just for the record, Arch USB ISO has arch-chroot command that does everything needed. So it’s quite easy to troubleshoot, when needed. Just mount what you need and arch-chroot there.

It was today when I first heard of it!

Using Arch for ~7 years or so! Both servers and desktops. Always just manually vimdiff’ed things.

Thanks for not much, I have never heard of it before.

Did anyone try CLI clients, like (neo)mutt for that? I expect it can be set up on a server (if we consider self-hosting) and do this job automatically. While all the AI thingy feels like magic, my practical experience shows that there are just some keywords or even just the sender, with which mails can be sorted.

I wonder, just another rename, X → XXX, would do well, wouldn’t it?