Frequency of communications with pfclient-upload.planefinder.net

Andreas Warburton

Andreas Warburton

New Member
I have a question about the frequency with which my RPi pfclient communicates with pfclient-upload.planefinder.net. It appears to be doing this every 10 seconds, or at least hitting the DNS every 10 seconds. Is this high frequency necessary, and is it adjustable? If so, how?

Many thanks,
Andreas
 
Hello Andreas,

No it is not configurable at all and the client at the moment uploads to our servers every 10 seconds. The reason you are seeing the frequent DNS queries is we have a low TTL set on that hostname in case of any changes that need to be made quickly.

We frequently benchmark our clients bandwidth use against others and we are consistently low compared to those.

That said some changes are coming later this year that will reduce the DNS queries and also bandwidth as well for a lot of users.

Hope that helps!

Lee
 
Hello Lee,

Thanks a lot; that's very helpful, yes. I just wanted to make sure that this was an intentional behaviour, as none of the (six) other feeds that I run from the same RPi hit the DNS at such a high rate. I noticed it simply because I recently installed Pi-hole and have noted that pfclient is saturating my DNS traffic logs.

Over time, I have noted with appreciation the low overall pfclient bandwidth, however. Thanks very much for that.

Best regards,
Andreas
 
No trouble at all. I do know other clients hammer DNS as well but you will see that to different hosts instead of the singular one.

DNS queries whilst frequent shouldn't actually consume that much bandwidth though.

Glad you appreciate the bandwidth usage being low, let's hope we can continue to reduce that further!
 
Just checking in to see if there is an updated expectation for this to get adjusted? Last year, you had predicted that an update later in 2018 would address this. For now, I've put the current IP address and pfclient-upload.planefinder.net alias in /etc/hosts as a workaround; however, that is of course not satisfactory in the long term.

Best regards,
Andreas (VA2WBT)
 
Hi Andreas,

Not at the moment. We are switching to a new upload mechanism that will do queries a lot less due to the way it works. The TTL on the DNS records will still be low though (and more likely to change).

The bandwidth required for these DNS queries will still be small though and be no where near the requirement for uploading data.

Lee
 
I was also getting fed up with my PiHole stats being overwhelmed by requests for pfclient-upload.planefinder.net so I installed dnsmasq on the receiver Raspberry Pi to cache the DNS requests locally. I now only get a DNS request to my PiHole every 5 minutes or so which is probably the TTL for the pfclient-upload.planefinder.net record.

I also had to disable IPv6 on the Raspberry Pi as the pfclient requests an IPv6 AAAA record every 10 seconds as well as the IPv4 A record. dnsmasq is unable to cache the response for the AAAA record because there is no AAAA record for pfclient-upload.planefinder.net so it keeps requesting it. IPv6 requests have gone from being a pretty significant volume of traffic on my PiHole to pretty much nothing as I'm on an IPv4 only network.

Requests for the pfclient-upload.planefinder.net A record have dropped from about 17,000 per day to just a few hundred per day.

Matt
 
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