Unable to dig _peer.internal when default name is used

Questions / Help
1

:wave: Howdy!

So I don’t know if this is a bug to report here or in GitHub - superfly/flyctl: Command line tools for fly.io services, so happy to move wherever.

If you do fly wg create, walk through the generic steps and let it create a default peer name for you, then attempting to lookup peers according to the docs will actually fail

On Peer A:

➜  ~ fly wg create nerves
Creating WireGuard peer "interactive-megakopf-jjcarstens-me-com-641" in region "sea" for organization nerves
# ...omitted logs
# connect Peer A to WireGuard with new config

Then on Peer B (connected via WireGuard):

➜  ~ dig +short txt _peer.internal @fdaa:0:45f6::3 
;; Warning: Message parser reports malformed message packet.

➜  ~ fly wg list nerves
+--------------------------------------------+--------+------------------------------+
|                    NAME                    | REGION |           PEER IP            |
+--------------------------------------------+--------+------------------------------+
| interactive-felix-jjcarstens-me-com-365    | sea    | fdaa:0:45f6:a7b:177d:0:a:302 |
| interactive-megakopf-jjcarstens-me-com-641 | sea    | fdaa:0:45f6:a7b:177d:0:a:202 |
| interactive-megakopf-jjcarstens-me-com-440 | sea    | fdaa:0:45f6:a7b:177d:0:a:102 |
| interactive-megakopf-jjcarstens-me-com-688 | sea    | fdaa:0:45f6:a7b:177d:0:a:2   |
+--------------------------------------------+--------+------------------------------

➜  ~ dig +short aaaa interactive-megakopf-jjcarstens-me-com-641._peer.internal @fdaa:0:45f6::3
➜  ~

But if you create the peer with your own peer name, things seem to work, but only for those peers created with names

➜  ~ fly wg create nerves sea felix
Creating WireGuard peer "felix" in region "sea" for organization nerves

# ...omitted log

➜  ~ dig +short txt _peer.internal  
"felix"

➜  ~ dig +short aaaa felix._peer.internal                              
fdaa:0:45f6:a7b:177d:0:a:402

Maybe this is working correctly? Though I would expect to be able to query the TXT for peers even if the name of a peer was generated for me :beers:

2

Yes! This is poorly documented but I think what you’re describing is working as expected.

We didn’t originally do anything different with interactive- peers, and they were in the DNS like everything else. But there are a zillion interactive- peers now, and nobody ever looks any of those names up, and they crud up our state sync, so we filter them out of DNS.

3

Perfect.

Can you change the name of a peer? Or is the process to just delete and recreate with desired arguments?

4

Yep, it’s just delete and re-create. Peers are cheap. :slight_smile:

(I know this is annoying, because you may have to swap out WireGuard configuration somewhere else; but yeah, the answer is that there’s nothing in our API that renames them).

5
6

Also, what would you think about adjust the fly wireguard create command to support --name and --region flags vs a hardcode order of arguments? Or even just switching the order to be fly wg create org name region [flags]?

Most of the time I’m fine with the auto selected region (or even prefer), but I want to specify the name

7

I can do the flags without breaking anything for anyone else (and I’m already in that code today) so, sure. :slight_smile: I’ll take a swing at it. (Kurt will want me to say “no promises”).

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