In the event of a DNS outage. How can we access GAW, TS and X?
🧐 Research Wanted 🤔
In the event of a global DNS outage, accessing websites becomes challenging, but it's possible to visit sites if you know their IP addresses by entering them directly into your browser. However, this method has limitations; websites often use dynamic IP addresses that can change, and accessing a site by IP might not work if it's behind a load balancer or CDN like Cloudflare, which X (formerly Twitter) uses. X's IP addresses have reportedly transitioned from 104.244.40.0/21 to 162.158.0.0/15, but these can be subject to change. Additionally, accessing sites by IP might bypass security checks or lead to certificate issues, making this a temporary workaround rather than a comprehensive solution for internet browsing during DNS outages.
I used nslookup to find TS IP which resulted in:
However, when I enter these IPs in the address bar I get:
Error 1003
Direct IP access not allowed
What happened?
You've requested an IP address that is part of the Cloudflare network. A valid Host header must be supplied to reach the desired website.
Yeah. That's not going to work. You need to add the addresses to your hosts file, and continue accessing them by their usual name.
https://www.howtogeek.com/27350/beginner-geek-how-to-edit-your-hosts-file/
Thanks. Forgot about the host file. The paragraph written in my post was from Grok. I'm surprised grok claimed you could just put the IP in the address bar
Add a host file entry on your machine and it will work via the domain name, skipping DNS. It may not work forever as the IPs may be subject to change.