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Comment by kingnothing | Hacker News Reader

A better recommendation is to use Cloudflare for one of your DNS servers and a completely different company for the other.

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Just wondering, how do y'all manage wifi portals and manually setting DNS services? I used to use cf and google's but it was so annoying to disable and re-enable that every time I use a public wifi network.

DNS is just a look up service. You can filter it or not but in the end it is just a "source of truth".

What are you trying to do on your wifi?

Many wifi networks redirect non-encrypted http traffic to their captive portal. For the redirect to work, your DNS needs to be the default one provided by the router so that http://neverssl.com resolves to the wifi's "Please accept our ToS to get online" page.

If you aren't using their DNS, then your network requests just get dropped (as you're not approved yet). You need their DNS to learn how to access their captive host so they can whitelist your mac address.

My clients use DHCP for everything and are always connected to my home VPN. If I'm away from home and need to connect to a captive network, I'll turn off the VPN, connect, then re-enable the VPN. I run unbound at home for DNS.

While I run a home VPN, I think using it exclusively runs into issues:

- frequently capture portals only permit access for 1-2hr. Your internet get cut off, then you have to realize its not a temporary issue, but portal issue, then you close the vpn, try to find the captive portal, and re-auth.

- latency is too high for my home vpn when I travel in asia

Yeah but on paper they're never going to recommend using a competitor

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