This may seem like edging towards paranoia, however, how many of you do a pre-flight check of your network before you use your devices?
Every morning when I start up my computer, I do a pre-flight check against sites like DNSLeakCheck, and several others. It’s a back check to make sure my network is operating in as private, secured, and an anonymous manner as possible, and perhaps give me a little more peace of mind.
To facilitate this in an expedient manner, I wrote a simple bat script to do just that.
@echo off
echo Opening websites in succession...
:: List of websites to open
set "websites=grc.com cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni browserleaks.com/dns dnscheck.tools ipleak.net"
:: Delay between opening each website (in seconds)
set "delay=5"
:: Loop through each website and open it
for %%i in (%websites%) do (
echo Opening %%i...
start "" "https://%%i"
timeout /t %delay% /nobreak >nul
)
echo All websites opened.
# pause
Critique, input always welcomed.
Take this the right way mate, but this seems like obsessive behaviour. Being sure is good and all, but this might be an unnecessary stress factor for you
Myself I don’t do any pre-flight checks. My VPN has a killswitch and I get a notification whenever it breaks on my server so I know to check it
Take this the right way mate, but this seems like obsessive behaviour.
I appreciate your concern seriously. Not taken in any other way.
Sure, my VPN has a kill switch too. While I may use the same locale on the VPN, I do sometimes get different IPs. New IPs demand to be checked out. Point being, here is a less than one minute check to see that everything is as it should be. Never trust, always verify or even trust but verify. How can one verify if one does not check?
Sure, I could pull up the cli and do a nslookup, and slog through a couple of other commands, or I can click an icon on my desktop and see results in a matter of seconds.
Fair! I don’t know your threat model.
Just a thought, can’t you automate it with a cron job or such on after boot though to just get a “all clear” whenever you login to your PC?
Well, I’m working on a python script that could be called with a cron. I’m also contemplating automating it with N8N since I selfhost it. However, tho I can code in basic terms in several languages, I am not the most competent coder, so it takes me a while. LOL
But again, I do appreciate your first comment and that you were concerned about my well being. I assure you I am a stable genius. lol Hey, it worked for one nut bag…
Hope it works out and take care! Mistrust in fine as long as paranoia is kept in check 😀
What are you attempting to achieve by opening this list of urls?
What is the difference between running this script and setting this list as either a bookmark, or the homepage in your browser?
What does your network have to do with the reachability of these sites?
If you’re managing the privacy of your own network, why are you not monitoring those services?
What are you attempting to achieve by opening this list of urls?
Making sure that my DNS isn’t leaking any info it shouldn’t. Checking to see if all my obfuscation techniques are still protecting.
What is the difference between running this script and setting this list as either a bookmark, or the homepage in your browser?
Nothing. More convenient for me to have a script. As far as start pages, all I want there is a blank page.
What does your network have to do with the reachability of these sites?
Nothing. These are sites used to check for various things as stated earlier, like dns leak checks, etc.
If you’re managing the privacy of your own network, why are you not monitoring those services?
They are heavily monitored.
