Subscribe to receive notifications of new posts:

Test all the things: IPv6, HTTP/2, SHA-2

2015-09-02

1 min read

NOTE: The https://http2.cloudflare.com site has been shut down. This blog was posted in 2015 and subsequently we took all the technologies here and made them part of our core product.

CloudFlare constantly tries to stay on the leading edge of Internet technologies so that our customers' web sites use the latest, fastest, most secure protocols. For example, in the past we've enabled IPv6 and SPDY/3.1.

Today we've switched on a test server that is open for people to test compatibility of web clients. It's a mirror of this blog and is served from https://http2.cloudflare.com/. The server uses three technologies that it may be helpful to test with: IPv4/IPv6, HTTP/2 and an SSL certificate that uses SHA-2 for its signature.

The server has both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

$ dig +short http2.cloudflare.com A
45.55.83.207
$ dig +short http2.cloudflare.com AAAA
2604:a880:800:10:5ca1:ab1e:f4:e001

The certificate is based on SHA-2 (in this case SHA-256). This is important because SHA-1 is being deprecated by some browsers very soon. On a recent browser the connection will also be secured using ECDHE (for forward secrecy).

And, finally, the server uses HTTP/2 if the browser is capable. For example, in Google Chrome, with the HTTP/2 and SPDY indicator extension the blue lightning bolt indicates that the page was served using HTTP/2:

This server isn't on the normal CloudFlare network and is intended for testing purposes only. We'll endeavor to keep it online so that people have an HTTP/2 endpoint to test clients against.

In Google Chrome's net-internals view you can see the HTTP/2 session in use when connecting to the site.

We hope that this will prove useful for people tests HTTP/2 compatible client software. Let us know how it goes.

Cloudflare's connectivity cloud protects entire corporate networks, helps customers build Internet-scale applications efficiently, accelerates any website or Internet application, wards off DDoS attacks, keeps hackers at bay, and can help you on your journey to Zero Trust.

Visit 1.1.1.1 from any device to get started with our free app that makes your Internet faster and safer.

To learn more about our mission to help build a better Internet, start here. If you're looking for a new career direction, check out our open positions.
HTTP2IPv6IPv4Speed & Reliability

Follow on X

Cloudflare|@cloudflare

Related posts

September 25, 2024 1:00 PM

Introducing Speed Brain: helping web pages load 45% faster

We are excited to announce the latest leap forward in speed – Speed Brain. Speed Brain uses the Speculation Rules API to prefetch content for the user's likely next navigations. The goal is to download a web page to the browser before a user navigates to it, allowing pages to load instantly. ...

September 20, 2024 2:00 PM

Cloudflare incident on September 17, 2024

On September 17, 2024, during planned routine maintenance, Cloudflare stopped announcing 15 IPv4 prefixes, affecting some Business plan websites for approximately one hour. During this time, IPv4 traffic for these customers would not have reached Cloudflare and users attempting to connect to websites using addresses within those prefixes would have received errors. ...