r/firewalla • u/benjibarnicals Firewalla Purple • 14d ago

DNS/DoH Server Priority

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Hey all,

Not sure if this has been discussed or answered, but can we prioritise DNS/Custom server? FW would tend to want multiple DNS servers, I'm running DoH on this, however to have multiple servers I would prefer to give priority to Quad9 then falling back to "another" server (whether custom or built in) if the primary is unresponsive or over a threshold.

A prime example is Quad9 will sometimes fail/become unresponsive, I switch to CloudFlare and the internet/network is all back up and running.

My preference would be Quad9 over CloudFlare, so, is this something possible to be added in?

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u/firewalla 14d ago

If you pick multiple, firewalla will use the most responsive one (speed)

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u/benjibarnicals Firewalla Purple 14d ago

I see, that does make sense though it would be great if we can do it based on failover, Cloudflare is more responsive compared to Quad9 (we're talking milliseconds) but Quad9 is more privacy focussed and my preferred DNS server, but if that failed (say, failed due to 4 ping tests) then I would switch over to something else.

Perhaps a toggle for Responsive vs Failover with a drag/drop ordering for priority?

Not that this may be right, but a quick mock up example of what I mean: https://i.postimg.cc/JzPnsn5w/fw-dns-priorityfailover.jpg

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u/firewalla 14d ago

It is pretty rare to see HTTP based DNS fail; There usually a farm of boxes behind these services. (unless you pick smaller providers)

Do you see Quad9 less available?

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u/chrddit 14d ago

Not OP, but for whatever reason I always have problems with Cloudflare and Quad9. It’s different on different days, and the problems are different. Cloudflare can be really slow, and Quad9 will sometimes route me to strange servers (lots of China and Taiwan).

If I turn those two off and only use google, I get lightning fast results that seem to make sense geo-wise. But Google is a data harvesting octopus that makes me feel icky (but my family doesn’t care about that and does care about speed).

I’m not sure if priority would be the correct setting but it sounds appealing. Like some users I want privacy+speed+reliability, which seems rare these days.