DNS redirect confusion
Hi!
I am knowledgeable to networking but I'm new to cloudflare, and I was pretty confused on why my domain works and how I can replicate it.
I had a namecheap domain and a URL redirect (going to a discord link) configured on that site, but when I migrated to cloudflare for SSL that URL redirect translated to a A record. That makes sense, but it points to a 192.x.x.x IP which I was confused about. I could not find any infomation on that IP or the rest of the redirect. I might be missing something but some explanation would be helpful.
Thanks! :)
3 Replies
Discord Invite links are just simple redirects to the invite, if it's proxied, it's probably a page rule or redirect rule and would break when unproxied.
The Value in a proxied a/aaaa/cname is only used if Cloudflare does not handle the request and return a response from a redirect or such, which is why you can use private IPs proxied and have it still work. DNS responds with Cloudflare's IPs when Proxied, and goes through the request flow.
(Side note: the IPs in /ips/ are just egress IPs used by proxy, not ingress IPs, which would you see in dig)
ahh yea I thought he was asking why it was working now, not before. The importer is a bit weird, wouldn't be surprised if it let you import a private IP proxied
imo IP list should be treated only as egress IPs (or at least it's simplest to say it is as such) and not an overall list of Cloudflare IPs (as it excludes a lot like WARP, Health checks, etc), it looks like it does include all of the normal proxy ones though, although I think there was some exception before but I can't remember
ahh I see why I got confused, I called 192.0.2.1 a private ip even though it's technically not, it's just reserved
anyway, sounds like he was just confused with proxy features
Cloudflare doesn't have the magical fake record types for redirects like namecheap does, instead you can proxy a record which leads to an unreachable web server, and use a Cloudflare feature like Page rules or dynamic redirects so that Cloudflare will generate a response on the edge and never try to contact your non-existent origin. Works as Floppydisk said, because Cloudflare responds with their proxied IPs and it flows through Cloudflare first
If you're looking for a guide on how you could set that up with discord:
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/forward-a-subdomain-to-discord/145028
Cloudflare Community
Forward A Subdomain To Discord
This tutorial is not about how to setup and configure your Discord server itself and it requires Page Rules. In case you did not use Page Rules before to redirect requests or want to know more about it, read this tutorial. . Even though there’s the above mentioned tutorial, I decided to create this one especially for Discord users as this ques...
Thanks everyone for the help, I'll check this out in the morning