Cloudflare proxy - always US IP? - server

How it's possible that Cloudflare proxy has always US IP address or Google, Netflix and etc when i access on their websites from Asia, why i don't see some Asia IP (I expected the most close server to me and not in US).
Why i connect like first to US IP, ok, they will have some kind of load balancer server, but for the most low latency for TTFB why it's works like that or is the US IP address associated to some Asia server?? What is the trick?
I tried find some info how it's works but it's always same answer and doesn't explain anything for me..it's just saying that it's in power of DNS..I know about GEO DNS, but there is my end, but simple GEO DNS will always show different IP then is there another layer of something?
I'm just lost..

As far as I know, the "proxy" feature of Cloudflare will always display and "use" an US based IP-Address.
Your request is still sent to the nearest Cloudflare data center (somewhere in Asia, in your case).
But the "proxy" IP (which is static), is always the same.
Not entirely sure though, might as well be worth contacting their support team and asking for exact information on this.

Related

Is there a way for a bot to find the IP address of my Digital Ocean Server when going through Cloudflare?

I am a PHP coder but not a server expert so I wondered if anyone could answer the following query.
Is there a way that a bot can determine the IP of my server when it runs through Cloudflare?
Someone suggested that folk could try ftp.domain.com and things like that. I do not have that setup on my server although Cloudflare do set this up automatically for you when you register a domain.
If you are a server expert and wanted to determine the actual IP of a server, how would you go about it?
Thanks.
PS: I do not want my IP public, hence the question.
Someone that really wants to find your server IP address probably can. We're only going to really stop basic lookups from returning your IPs, but we can only proxy web traffic & some records on your domain (mail, for example) may still return your server IP.
We do have some tips on minimizing the probability that someone could find it easily with these guidelines.

Technically what is an "application" when referred to in the Google Static Maps Rate Limits docs

From https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/staticmaps/#Limits I read:
The Google Static Maps API has the following usage limits:
25 000 free static map requests per application per day.
If I'm not providing an API key in the URL, how does it determine the limit? IP of the referring page? domain of the referring URL? IP of the client?
We used the static maps on our website, we've discovered it uses the IP address of the client. So someone who looked at our website a lot would find the big your quota has been exceeded image would appear for them but not for me.
I start by declaring that I do not know this, but the logical choice is the domain.
With ip restriction multiple clients on the same web server would consume each others quotas which they should have thought of.
*Client ip would be useless in every metric.
*Server ip would mean multiple clients on one host would consume each others quota.
Whats left is the domain. However with that said, Google is know to use their brains and I would not be surprised if they have a combination running to find abuse. Like so.
If domainA.com uses up 25 000 in one day and them immediately domainB.com comes online and starts asking for images from the same ip that might ring some bells.
Of course the same would be true even for different ip if they all request the same location.
So in summary, I think if you randomize which domain asks for the map at any given cient request and only locally mark a domain as spent (for the day) when you get error back I think you can request infinite amount (if you have infinite domains). With the possible caveat of detection if all request the same location.
Of course spreading the different domains over different servers/ip would make it impossible to detect, however unlikely it's needed.
There is no clarity in the pricing model and the usage limits that Google has posted for their web service API's but I guess the accepted answer is wrong and misleading - refer Two conflicting statements for google static map usage
The 25k usage limit will be for the application and not for its client.

Search engine to check if a particular ip is web server

I have to automatically find web servers in certain ip range
It should not look like attack so I cannot use ping, curl, lynx. I cannot also use reverse dns.
The other approach is using search engine like google or bing. I can search by putting ip in search box later I can check if address contains ip then I know that is web server.
But google not returns useful data. For example for ip 212.77.100.101 (which is web server) does not return useful results, any of them on results web page does not contain 212.77.100.101 on address (https://www.google.pl/search?q=212.77.100.101).
Is there any other solution to that problem or is there any search engine to use?
This would really depend on a lot of factors. Your going to need some scripting heft to search through straight up google results for the information you want. Plus what do you mean by server? Just like a regular ole website server? You could probably utilize arin whois in some way to query ip addresses and any belonging to google, yahoo, etc etc you could identify as a LIKELY server IP address. If your looking to see if it's a server based on more technical information like OS, ports, etc etc there isn't much you'll likely find on google.
For instance an ARIN WHOIS of a google ip comes to this, http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-74-125-0-0-1/pft . Using your preference of language you could probably make the query to the web page and have it return the DOM or w/e to a variable and then look for the element that would have identifying information such as a google designation under name or something to that effect.
The best way to really tell, AFAIK, is to check ports and other techniques, which you cannot do by the sound of it. I'm not aware of a database you can access either that would have that information by IP address either...
What do you mean by server? That would help narrow down what your looking to accomplish. Just any IP serving up some sort of data? Or anything that comes back to a linux box or something?
More detail! :D

iphone app can't see internal network

I'm working on an Enterprise app that communicates with our company servers. I have full two-way communication between the phone and the server through 3G/4G, and it works from my home wifi, but using the wifi at the office where it is connected to the company network the app doesn't see the server that way.
The app is set to look for our external IP address, and the port is open to the server. But I guess the external IP address is not 'visible' from within the network. When I plug in the internal IP address of the server, it goes through just fine.
For the vast number of our users, that would not be a problem. Most of our users (employees) work in the field or in other offices. But for users inside our network, this arrangement is useless unless the user turned off his wifi. But that's not a professional way to do it.
I need to know if there's a way for my app to either use 3G/4G exclusively, or to discover the SSID of the wifi and decide which IP address to use. I'm guessing that the answers to both of these will be, "you can't do that," But I thought I'd ask anyway.
Thanks!
You could have it attempt the internal IP, and fall back to the external IP if it can't connect. A better solution might be to have an internal DNS server that serves the internal IP to in-network devices, though.
Well, I discovered this code is exactly what I need. It gives me the SSID in string form, and I can compare the SSID string with a string of our wifi's SSID, and if it matches then the app uses the internal IP address. And if it doesn't match, it will connect to the external IP address. So far it works perfectly!
Followup: ceejayoz, I don't know if your second suggestion is the same as what our IT guy did, but he created a domain name that will resolve to the server whether it's internal or external. That seems to be the best way to go. So even though I had a workable answer, the URL works better with less code.

Redirect users to the nearest server based on their location without changing url

This is my case:
I have 6 servers across US and Europe. All servers are on a load balancer. When you visit the website (www.example.com) its pointing on the load balancer IP address and from their you are redirect to one of the servers. Currently, if you visit the website from Germany for example, you are transfered randomly in one of the server. You could transfer to the Germany server or the server in San Fransisco.
I am looking for a way to redirect users to the nearest server based on their location but without changing url. So I am NOT looking of having many url's such as www.example.com, www.example.co.uk, www.example.dk etc
I am looking for something like a CDN where you retrieve your files from the nearest server (?) so I can get rid of the load balancer because if it crashes, the website does not respond (?)
For example:
If you are from uk, redirect to IP 53.235.xx.xxx
If you are from west us, redirect to IP ....
if you are from south europe, redirect to IP ... etc
DNSMadeeasy offers a feature similar to this but they are charging a 600 dollars upfront price and for a startup that doesnt know if that feature will work as expected or there is no trial version we cannot afford: http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/enterprise-dns/global-traffic-director/
What is another way of doing this?
Also another question on the current setup. Even with 6 servers all connected to the load balancer, if the load balancer has lag issues, it takes everything with it, right? or if by any change it goes down, the website does not respond. So what is the best way to eliminate that downtime so that if one server IP address does not respond, move to the next (as a load balancer would do but load balancers can have issues themselves)
Would help to know what type of application servers you're talking about; i.e. J2EE (like JBoss/Tomcat), IIS, etc?
You can use a hardware or software load balancer with Sticky IP and define ranges of IPs to stick to different application servers. Each country's ISPs should have it's own block of IPs.
There's a list at the website below.
http://www.nirsoft.net/countryip/
Here's also a really, really good article on load balancing in general, with many high availability / persistence issues addressed. That should answer your second question on the single point of failure at your load balancer; there's many different techniques to provide both high availability and load distribution. Alot depends on what kind of application your run and whether you require persistent sessions or not. Load balancing by sticky IP, if persistence isn't required and you're LB does health checks properly, can provide high availability with easy failover. The downside is that load isn't evenly distributed, but it seems you're looking for distribution based on proximity, not on load.
http://1wt.eu/articles/2006_lb/index.html