HN Explorer

Question about Virtual DNS with Cloudflare

2 points by iamjason89 ↗ HN
I'm trying to accomplish something that I'm not sure is doable. I'm using Cloudflare for the domain rainbowgardensinc.com and have a CNAME for the cdn.rainbowgardensinc.com record that goes to rainb.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com, as shown below.

I'm using Cloudflare for my nameservers as well and want to mask the returned IP/CNAME record. I'm aware of CNAME flattening but that doesn't mask the IP, it just returns it. I just want to hide the returned IP address like it does for the root level domain and gives back a Cloudflare IP instead. Does anyone know if this is doable or if there is a service they offer to do it?

-------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------

What it looks like right now:

  rainbowgardensinc.com.        	NS  	maya.ns.cloudflare.com.
  rainbowgardensinc.com.        	NS  	cory.ns.cloudflare.com.
  rainbowgardensinc.com.        	A   	104.27.179.101
  rainbowgardensinc.com.        	A   	104.27.178.101
  www.rainbowgardensinc.com.    	A   	104.27.178.101
  www.rainbowgardensinc.com.    	A   	104.27.179.101
  cdn.rainbowgardensinc.com.    	CNAME	rainb.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com.
  rainb.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com.	A   	94.31.29.96
If we use CNAME flattening, it would show like this:

  cdn.rainbowgardensinc.com.    	A	94.31.29.96
I want it to look like this after:

  rainbowgardensinc.com.        	NS  	maya.ns.cloudflare.com.
  rainbowgardensinc.com.        	NS  	cory.ns.cloudflare.com.
  rainbowgardensinc.com.        	A   	104.27.179.101
  rainbowgardensinc.com.        	A   	104.27.178.101
  www.rainbowgardensinc.com.    	A   	104.27.178.101
  www.rainbowgardensinc.com.    	A   	104.27.179.101
  cdn.rainbowgardensinc.com.    	A	104.27.178.101
  cdn.rainbowgardensinc.com.    	A	104.27.179.101

4 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 19.5 ms ] thread
eastdakota
That should work if you "orange cloud" (activate) the cdn.rainbowgardensinc.com CNAME entry in the CloudFlare DNS control panel.
iamjason89
Hey, thanks for responding to this. I'm sure you have things to do so I appreciate any time you take.

I have a screenshot of my CF panel here and the orange cloud is not available for that CNAME and I'm not sure why that would be. Maybe it's is a paid service I don't have access to.

http://rainbowgardensinc.com/cf_dns.png

The cdn CNAME is pointing to MaxCDN and they should be compatible with Cloudflare. I'm just not sure if there is a way to mask\hide that this CNAME resolves to them or not. I feel like it needs to return the IP from MaxCDN in order to even function.

I'm gonna reach out to them and see if they can offer any suggestions. Any other input you have would be appreciated. Thanks again

xxdesmus
We don't allow CloudFlare to be enabled on that particular record because it's pointing at MaxCDN. In the particular case of proxying traffic to MaxCDN we've seen incompatibilities in the past that have lead to occasional errors. To ensure you don't encounter those errors we block enabling CloudFlare on that particular record.
iamjason89
Okay, that makes sense. I saw the orange cloud was available for other CNAME records and was unsure about that. I have a client that I believe currently has the orange cloud enabled on a CNAME pointing to MaxCDN but was probably done before this change was put in place. I was curious how that was setup as I couldn't do it under my account but it all makes sense now.

Thanks again for both of yalls input.