I am the original author and maintainer of the open source project, Stuntman.  Stuntman is an implementation of the STUN protocol, which includes the STUN server. More details at www.stunprotocol.org.  In short, a STUN server helps bootstream direct "p2p" connections such as WebRTC sessions or similar VOIP scenarios by allowing internet devices to self-discover their own public IP address and obtain a (UDP) port for communicating with another node.

I also run a public instance of a STUN server with the code at stun.stunprotocol.org.  It's been up and running for about 10 years now. It's hosted on AWS.  In recent years, the hosting bills for this server have started to get on the high side, even with reserved instances.  The number of STUN queries it processes per day is now on the order of hundreds of millions. The stunprotocol.org domain receives nearly a million DNS queries on Route 53 daily. What used to cost a trivial number of dollars to run is now starting to reach $1000 in annual service costs.  This isn't paid for by a corporation or well funded internet organization. I pay this out of my personal pocket.

It's been a mystery what has been driving the increasing traffic to the server - especially redundant requests from the same IPs.  I was inspecting the DNS logs the other day and started to investigate the nodes sending out redundant DNS requests repetitively.  Trying to understand why these nodes wouldn't leverage DNS caching.  And to my surprise, one of the IPs was running a web server that presented a TOR landing page.  That led me to discover this discussion online:

And a quick inspection of the Snowflake code leads me to find that stun.stunprotocol.org is the default STUN server for Snowflake proxy and listed throughout the documentation as well.

While the Snowflake project has good intentions, it doesn't appear to take my hosting costs into consideration. I'm hoping we can have a good discussion on the following:

1) How many snowflake clients and proxies are active and how many STUN requests are each generating towards stunprotocol.org?  Do we think the entire worldwide usage of Snowflake could be responsible for millions of STUN queries to stunprotocol.org per day?

2) Expected number of DNS queries (it's a 3-day TTL on these DNS entries, so it blows my mind that there are so many redundant requests). Does Pion or any other part of the Snowflake code tend to go direct to the namespace server itself?

3) Removing stun.stunprotocol.org as the default STUN server.

OR...

4) Alternatively, I'm always open to accepting donations to help run the service costs of stunprotocol.org. I'm definitely not getting rich running this thing.

Thanks,

John Selbie