Saturday, July 04, 2020

How to bypass a website ban by DNS over HTTPS?

Recently I found that my default search engine DuckDuckGo (duckduckgo.com) was not opening in any web browser, while all other websites are working fine. In a basic troubleshooting, I found that my ISP ( ACT Fibrenet in Bengaluru, India) is blocking my DNS query to duckduckgo.com. ( See my blog on Domain name service DNS ).

DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH)

What is Domain name service (DNS) ?


When we type a URL address in any internet browser like google chrome or Internet explorer, the browser translates that name to something it understands, a number, called IP Address. In Internet, all the connected devices have an unique IP address. Eg: Google website ( google.com or google.in ) has an unique IP Address, Yahoo has its own address. It is difficult to remember all these addresses, that is when DNS helps us. A server running this DNS service maintains a table to translate the Name to IP Address to make things easy for humans

Monday, January 13, 2020

Extending Multiple VLANs over trunk interface to Windows Server

Physical setup:

A Microsoft windows server with two NICs connected to a Network switch. There is a requirement to extend multiple VLANs to the server.

Steps:

Configure the network switch interfaces connected to the server as trunk ports. Trunk ports allow multiple VLANs to pass-through. Technically, All the packets passing through trunk ports must have an VlanID in the ethernet packet. the receiving switch decides where to forward the packet based on the VlanID tag. If any packet arrives without VlanID, it is considered as packet belonging to the VLAN marked as "Native VLAN". In cisco switches, "Vlan 1" is the default "Native VLAN".
Cisco Switch commands: