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rajannpatel / Pi-Hole-PiVPN-on-Google-Compute-Engine-Free-Tier-with-Full-Tunnel-and-Split-Tunnel-OpenVPN-Configs

Run your own privacy-first ad blocking service in the cloud for free on Google Cloud Services.
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Best way to use the static Anycast IP for multiple DNS Servers? #33

Closed LoopsGod closed 5 years ago

LoopsGod commented 5 years ago

First of all, thank you very much for this guide! This was awesome, I wasn't familiar with setting up a Pi-hole and static IP before, but it was a blast! What an easy setup.

I do have a question, something wasn't really clear for me. The IPv4 address is Anycast, however how do I set up multiple servers?

Let's say I were to have 1 server in the US and 1 in Europe West, what's the best way to do this? I would like to have people in Europe connecting to the europe-west DNS Server and people from the US to the US server. Europe to my US Pi-hole server still gives me about 102 ms for a DNS query.

Edit: I'm not entirely sure what the documentation in REASONS.md says. It tells me that the DNS request would take 1 hop to my nearest ISP on average... However, pinging a website gives me about 100ms, and my surfing is noticeably slower. What is being explained in the REASONS file then? Am I doing something wrong? It would be really great to set this up with the closest PoP Server from Google.

Thanks in advance! Really appreciate you guys taking the time for this.

rajannpatel commented 5 years ago

The IPv4 Anycast information in REASONS.md summarized information from this page: https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/

I think I did a poor job of explaining that your hops to get to the Google network are significantly shorter, by virtue of using the Premium Network. Once you are in the Google network, it is still routing your DNS request from Europe over the ocean to America. If you are doing a full tunnel, then all your traffic routes through America.

Sadly, only the US regions us-central1, us-east1 and us-west1 offer an f1 micro compute instance under a free tier at this time. If you provision one in Europe (and you certainly can), it would cost you a little bit more to run this. I hope this answers your question. Feel free to close this issue if it does, I am happy to clarify further if needed.

rajannpatel commented 5 years ago

Also worth mentioning, if you spin up 2 servers with the intention of performing Load Balancing, you are stepping outside of the limits of what is possible in the free tier.

LoopsGod commented 5 years ago

Aha, yes I know. I am very familiar with GCP, love it. However I was having a hard time grapsing the Anycast idea. Because I feel like I have to spin up 2 separate servers now and have someone connect to a US or a EU server, correct?

Is there any way to just use 1 IP? Not sure how the load balancing things work.

Thanks for your quick answer btw.

rajannpatel commented 5 years ago

From a cost and complexity standpoint, spinning up 2 servers each with their own IP addresses would make the most sense. If you are set on learning how global load balancing works, you still have to spin up 2 servers, but delegate the anycast IP to the load balancer. It should pick the server in the appropriate region for you.

rajannpatel commented 5 years ago

I should mention, both servers should have the same public and private VPN keys if you set up the load balancer. So it doesn't matter which server you get routed to, the VPN connection will always successfully get established.

rajannpatel commented 5 years ago

I was curious if there was any additional information I could provide, if not, perhaps we can mark this issue as closed?

LoopsGod commented 5 years ago

Sorry for not replying, was a little short on time. Anyway, thank you for you answers; I've spun up another server and that should work fine, however the connection doesn't work with my EU server. I think I've set it up incorrectly so I have to do it again.

Thank you for you help!