this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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Lots of dead Lemmy/Kbin domains have CNAME records pointing to the same domain parking company (lemmy.pierre-couy.fr)
submitted 3 months ago by pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.pierre-couy.fr/post/584644

While monitoring my Pi-Hole logs today, I noticed a bunch of queries for XXXXXX.bodis.com, where XXXXXX are numbers. I saw a few variations for the numbers, each one being queried several times.

Digging further, I found out these queries were caused by CNAME records on domains that look like they used to point to Lemmy/Kbin instances.

From what I understand, domain owners can register a CNAME record to XXXXXX.bodis.com and earn some money from the traffic it receives. I guess that each number variation is a domain owner ID in Bodis' database. I saw between 5 to 10 different number variations, each one being pointed to by a bunch of old Lemmy domains.

This probably means that among actors who snatch expired domains, several of them have taken a specific interest with expired domains of old Lemmy instances. Another hypothesis is that there were a lot of domains registered for hosting Lemmy during the Reddit API debacle (about 1 year ago), which started expiring recently.

Are there any other instance admins who noticed the same thing ? Is any of my two hypothesis more plausible than the other ? Should we worry about this trend ?

Anyway, I hope this at least serves as a reminder to not let our domains expire ;)

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[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yes, that's the full domain. It used to host communities such as !pf2general@pathfinder.social. Unfortunately it's been dead for 9–10 months now.

[–] pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The fact that it has not been bought as soon as the domain expired makes me believe this instance went down before the trend started

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm actually not really clear on what the status of that instance is. Like, for me, when I browse to https://pathfinder.social, I actually see what looks like an empty Lemmy instance running 0.18.2. Some communities show the same for me, while others show a generic error message. So I don't know whether it's running in some failed state due to caching, or deregistered, or what.

[–] pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's really really weird, I cannot resolve the domain to an IP, even after trying a bunch of different DNS servers. If you're on linux, can you run nslookup pathfinder.social and paste the output here ?

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

If you’re on linux

I'm not, but I do have WSL installed. It returned "Can't find pathfinder.social: No answer"

Out of interest, I tried the same command in Microsoft PowerShell, I get:

Server:  dns9.quad9.net
Address:  9.9.9.9

Name:    pathfinder.social

That's the full output. No actual list of returned addresses.

I'm guessing my system just has pathfinder.social cached.

[–] pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, this probably has to do with the cache. You can try opening dev tools (F12 in most browsers), go to the network tab, and browse to pathfinder.social. You should see all requests going out, including "fake requests" to content that you already have locally cached

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh neat, I'd never thought of that before. Woulda been handy back last time I was working on a PWA!

200 OK (from service worker)

So yeah, getting it from the cache.

[–] pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 2 points 3 months ago

There is even a "Ignore cache" box in the devtools network tab