Every morning, I do a multiple DNS Leak test just as a precaution. Today, I did the leak test and all my IPs were different. They were the same IP block, just different. This made me suspicious and I set about trying to track the problem down. Turns out, there was a misconfiguration in the VPS. Worked yesterday, different today. I guess it was ghosts or gremlins in the machinery.
I got to thinking, for you guys who download a lot of Linux ISOs, might be a good idea to check daily. Even though you are setting behind a VPN, it’s still worth the minute it takes to fire off multiple DNS Leak checks just for a sanity check.
DNS leak tests only understand your exit IP. If your VPN provider allows round Robin load balancing, this may happen. This is a drawback of VPN exits out of your control, that you can’t know how their exits are handled.
Why you are so concerned about DNS leaks beyond one test is another matter only you can solve. Unless you are changing your dnssec config daily, this should be checked once.
The way I see it is, we have three options:
As a fellow tinhat wearer, I applaud your reluctance to trust what they tell you.
However, there isn’t much you can do about your VPN provider setting up multiple exit routes, or maybe they’re doing something really fancy like NAT filtering DNS requests so big players like Netflix have a harder time catching on to ppl geo-hopping.
But the outcome is the same: you have no control over this behaviour.
Yes, I totally understand that. It seemed suspicious to me because it had never happened to me before. (I have bookmarked a few articles about this 'Round Robin to read this evening) Like I said, This check gets done every morning, and has been a ‘ritual’ for years, and I have had the same VPN provider for years. So, that is what triggered my anxiety. I appreciate what everyone else has said, and I bow to greater knowledge bases than I possess. At the very least, TIL. So it’s been a good day 'tater.
Fair enough.
I see your posts and comments regularly in self-hosted, keep it up. Staying engaged is learning.