Stan Larroque's Blog

Blog

  • Going to Laponia

    We decided with my brother to hike together in an unusual place : Laponia, and more precisely at the very North of Sweden.

    We landed in Kiruna, and hitchhiked to Nikkaluokta, the start of our hike. The goal was to reach Abisko from Nikkaluokta by using a portion of the Kungsleden (the king’s road, one of the most famous trails in Sweden) Wikipedia.

    Here you will find the exact path we used, and you can google “Abisko – Nikkaluokta” if you want to make the same trip. We made it in four days, but it is typically a walk of 6-7 days or more if you want to relax.

    Our path

    Here are some photos along the way, we had a nice weather. Only trick: there is no night time, it’s always “day” but you can feel when the Sun goes behind the mountains. We had an average of 13°C with 75% of humidity, very good conditions to hike.

    We saw some rabbits and reindeers in packs, but it is mostly a desertic and hostile place. In two words : magnificent and quiet.

  • Surviving the Hacker News “hug of death”

    A quick article to mention that one of my articles on the DNS requests made by iPhones made the front page of Hacker News for a few hours. (and it got a lot of interesting comments!)

    When your post gets on the front page, there is what we call in the community the “HN hug of death”. It describes the huge traffic you will see on the URL you shared, and sometimes your site becomes unresponsive because the server is bloated.

    To be totally honest, I didn’t suffer from it because this blog is running with a very tiny CMS (almost a static website), the server is not a small VM and the front end is not bloated with dozens of requests.

    I got 10 114 unique visitors to the blog post from Hacker News on that day, so with a well-optimized website, everything should be fine!

  • High number of DNS requests made by iOS devices

    I run a simple ad blocker based on AlgoVPN. It is a simple adblocker for iOS devices. It blocks requests at the DNS level, so it is network-wide and thus very efficient.

    The connections are strictly anonymous and very secure (the code is here), but I anonymously log the DNS requests. It is a way of monitoring the usages of my servers.

    When I tested the service on my device, I discovered that iOS communicated non-stop with Apple servers. I thought it was linked to the Push services, but I looked into the logs and here are the concerned domains that are iOS-related:

    apple.com
icloud.com
akamaiedge.net
akamadns.net
apple-dns.net
akamai.net
akadns.net
cdn-apple.com
aaplimg.com

    Here is a screenshot showing the unexpected number of requests your phone makes. Notice the activity between 3AM and 5AM (I swear I was sleeping haha).

    I haven’t tried on Android devices, but it should be interesting as well. Another experiment would be to block these domains and see the impact on your battery life 😉

    UPDATE:

    Here is what it looks like with more devices. Observe the difference of requests between the two graphs.

    Here is a breakdown of all concerned hosts in a light csv file.

    Read more on the Hacker News discussion.