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Comment by sammy2255 | Hacker News Reader

1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 are served by the same service. It's not advertised as a redundant fully separate backup or anything like that...

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Wait, then why does 1.0.0.1 exist? I'll grant I've never seen it advertised/documented as a backup, but I just assumed it must be because why else would you have two? (Given that 1.1.1.1 already isn't actually a single point, so I wouldn't think you need a second IP for load balancing reasons.)

Far quicker to type ping 1.1 than ping 1.1.1.1

1.0.0.0/24 is a different network than 1.1.1.0/24 too, so can be hosted elsewhere. Indeed right now 1.1.1.1 from my laptop goes via 141.101.71.63 and 1.0.0.1 via 141.101.71.121, which are both hosts on the same LINX/LON1 peer but presumably from different routers, so there is some resilience there.

Given DNS is about the easiest thing to avoid a single point of failure on I'm not sure why you would put all your eggs in a single company, but that seems to be the modern internet - centralisation over resilience because resilience is somehow deemed to be hard.

> Far quicker to type ping 1.1 than ping 1.1.1.1

I guess. I wouldn't have thought it worthwhile for 4 chars, but yes.

> 1.0.0.0/24 is a different network than 1.1.1.0/24 too, so can be hosted elsewhere.

I thought anycast gave them that on a single IP, though perhaps this is even more resilient?

Not a network expert but anycast will give you different routes depending on where you are. But having 2 IPs will give you different routes to them from the same location. In this case since the error was BGP related, and they clearly use the same system to announce both IPs, both were affected.

In the internet world you can't really advertise subnets smaller than a /24, so 1.1.1.1/32 isn't a route, it's via 1.1.1.0/24

You can see they are separate routes, say looking at Telia's routing IP

https://lg.telia.net/?type=bgp&router=fre-peer1.se&address=1...

In this case they both are advertised from the same peer above, I suspect they usually are - they certainly come from the same AS, but they don't need to. You could have two peers with cloudflare with different weights for each /24

I don't know of it's the reason, but inet_aton[0] and other parsing libraries that match its behaviour will parse 1.1 as 1.0.0.1. I use `ping 1.1` as a quick connectivity test.

[0] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/inet_aton.3.html#DESCR...

Wasn’t it also because a lot of hotel / public routers used 1.1.1.1 for captive portals and therefore you couldn’t use 1.1.1.1?

Because operating systems have two boxes for DNS server IP addresses, and Cloudflare wants to be in both positions.

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