Cloudflare's ipfs Gateway vs. hosting your own ipfs gateway - ipfs

I'm trying to impelement an ipfs gateway. I'm on cloudflare and saw that they already have their gateway you can CNAME to.
What are the pros/cons of hosting your own Gateway vs. using Cloudflare's

If you host your own gateway, you have complete control over what content is stored/served on it. You could also be helping serve the wider network by not relying on Cloudflare as a SPoF.
Pros of hosting your own gateway:
Control over what's served/stored on the gateway (could pin content you want served faster on the node, blacklist content you don't want)
Contribute to the wider network of gateways, no longer relying on solely CloudFlare as a SPoF
Control over the gateway makes it easier to serve your website as the intended domain (don't have to rely on CNAME)
Cons of hosting your own gateway:
Possible moral/legal responsibility to block bad content
Costs could be more than a regular node if the gateway is public

Related

Add HSTS to an Azure API Management Service

On Azure, I created a new API Management Service and behind it I connected all the APIs.
After a penetration test, there was only one vulnerability detected from the security company that is No HSTS Header observed.
The HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) policy defines a time-frame where a browser must connect to the web server via HTTPS. Without a Strict Transport Security policy the web application may be connect to the application using unencrypted HTTP. The application does not specify any HSTS configuration.
Potential Impact
If the web application mixes usage of HTTP and HTTPS, an attacker can manipulate pages in the unsecured area of the application or change redirection targets in a manner that the switch to the secured page is not performed or done in a manner, that the attacker remains between client and server.
If there is no HTTP server, an attacker in the same network could simulate a HTTP server and motivate the user to click on a prepared URL by a social engineering attack.
So, my question is: how can I apply this policy across my APIs?
There is no way to implement a policy in azure api management we can only implement inbound and out bound policies which are pre defined.
You can define/implement HSTS in you api if you are using asp.net core .
Here we use app.UseHsts(); to implement the HTST policies in the api .
For detailed and Indepth explanation refer the documentation.

How to add cloud flare's ips to Oracle cloud infrastructure whitelist

I purchased a domain from namecheap, and I'm gonna to use cloudflare to DNS my domain, but it says Error 521.
I created an free instance on Oracle.
Cloudflare suggest me to add their ips to oracle, but I have no idea where to add these ips.
We're from the Solutions Architecture team over at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and wanted to give you a few pointers to help you out.
What this error indicates, is Cloudflare is having problems accessing your website. Most likely this is because you have not yet configured your website to be accessible from the internet. While we didn't write this, it appears the community has a set of instructions here on how to expose your site to the internet:
https://dev.to/yoursunny/how-to-host-a-website-in-oracle-cloud-free-tier-5hca
Here's another online class for doing the same with wordpress: https://www.udemy.com/course/wordpress-website-built-on-oracle-cloud-always-free-tier/
Once done, you'll want to test your website by IP address in a web browser to make sure you can at least load your web page.
What Cloudflare is suggesting is you should actually only open access to your website from the specific IP addresses of the Cloudflare network. This increases the security of your website by preventing people from bypassing Cloudflare if they know your site's IP address. To do so, instead of adding 0.0.0.0/0 as the allowed CIDR you add an individual entry for each CIDR listed here: https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/
For testing though, just use 0.0.0.0/0 until you have it working. Then you can change it.
Finally, don't forget to check host firewall rules (see iptables --list). Not having a entry for port 80/443 is a common error.
Let us know if it works for you.
I have a similar setup where cloudflare is fronting my app. However, in my case I am just using a public load balancer in OCI. Bought a domainname pointing to the public IP of load balancer. This way first I tested my site without the domain name and just hitting load balancer IP. If that works fine, then in the Cloudflare you just need to proxy the domain to the public IP of LoadBalancer.

In Google Cloud Platform, Is there a any service to be a replacement of Web server (Nginx Or Apache) and Load Balancer(Haproxy)

RightNow, I am manging URL's and its redirection using Nginx hosted on physical machine. URL Redirection is achieved and pointed to different load balancers(Haproxy) as mentioned in the vhost file of Nginx.
Is there any option available in GCP to provide the services of redirection without using Nginx and Apache? And also let me know what are the alternate options available in GCP for Haproxy
From what I understand you have a few services (and maybe some static content) serving via Haproxy (which is doing load balancing) to the Internet.
Based on that I assume that if someone wants to go to "yourservice.com/example1" would be redirected by load balancer to service1, and if someone types "yourservice.com/static1" them he will be served static content by different service etc.
GCP has exactly a service you're asking for which can do url/content based load balancing. You can also move your current services to the Google Compute Engine (as virtual machines) or Google Kubernetes Engine which will run your services as a containers.
Also - using GCE or GKE can do autoscaling if that's what you need.
Load balancing provided by the GCP can do all the content based balancing that Haproxy which you're using now.
If you're using some internal load balancing now, I believe it could also be done with one load balancer ( and could simplify your configuration (just some VM or containers running your services and one load balancer).
You can read more about load balancing concepts and specifically about setting up GCP to do that.

Azure Traffic Manager Browser Caching Issue

In Azure's traffic manager, I am doing some testing with TWO failover URLs: Two different endpoints are configured for the traffic manager (failover1.mysite.com, failover2.mysite.com.), however, my local browser (Chrome for example) seems to be caching the DNS record on its own and redirecting to what it thinks is still the destination, rather than letter Azure Traffic Manager re-route. Trying the request in a new browser or Incognito session will result in the request reaching the correct site. But for existing sessions, failover updates are not being registered and still hitting the site we are trying to redirect traffic away from. Does anyone have any experience with this?
I had the same issue while I was dealing with Azure Traffic Manager or AWS CloudFront.
DNS Record is associated with its TTL value. It is not something wrong with the Azure Traffic Manager. It is the TTL value that is letting the DNS client to cache the IP address.
How to check TTL value of DNS:
If you are using Windows,
https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/nslookup-checking-dns-records-on-windows/
If you are using linux follow the detailed instructions here,
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-use-dig-to-find-dns-time-to-live-ttl-values/
Hope it helps.
From Microsoft's overview of their load balancing services:
Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer [...] it load balances only at the domain level. For that reason, it can't fail over as quickly as Front Door, because of common challenges around DNS caching and systems not honoring DNS TTLs.
With Front Door you can route requests to different backends based on rules and/or the health of the backends themselves so it doesn't have the issue you describe.

How to automatically detect a server?

We have developed a client app and a server app. The client communicates with the server using the http protocol and sends some data to be processed by the server.
Our structure allow us to have the server installed anywhere. I can be on the same client network or even on the cloud.
When the server is hosted on the cloud, it makes sense asking the user for the server address (since it can change if the user wishes to) but it does not make sense when the server is on the same network that the client. Besides that, we are currently asking users to configure the server ip/name in order to connect to the server.
To avoid this (asking users for the address) I have developed a discovery service based on UDP. The client broadcasts a message that the server answer with its address. It does work on some cases, but it does not when the user has some kind of firewall, proxy or even an anti virus.
I have read a lot about discovery services, and the one that a like most is Bonjour.
So, the question is: what is the best way of discovering a server's IP when the server is on the same network that the client without being blocked by firewalls, proxies, etc?
You can keep your service purely local (in the intranet) and build on top of what you are using now by implementing hole punching. You can get past firewalls, but Im really not sure about AV software policies.
Or you can establish a well-known http-based discovery service in the internet.
A server comes alive, sends its (local) ip address to the discovery service (keeps sending keep-alives)
On startup, the client queries that discovery service, identifies the local subnet he is in, and gets back the local ip address of the server.
That of course creates a single point of failure in your system in that if the discovery service kicks the bucket, your clients cannot find servers. You can remedy that by replicating the service and/or introducing fallback mechanisms (like the purely local discovery you have), which you probably want to do anyway. The only problem you might have is the subnet identification, if computers in local subnets dont share external IP addresses (then it depends on what a local subnet is for you).