Trick Dropbox DNS Filtering

with a CNAME domain entry. If you work at a place that filteres the famous Dropbox service or want to share files with somebody at a place that filters access to the dropbox website, this might be very helpful to you. If you have access to a domain name you could simply create a CNAME record, that points to the original dropbox download server.

A CNAME record is an abbreviation for Canonical Name record and is a type of resource record in the Domain Name System (DNS) that specifies that the domain name is an alias of another, canonical domain name.

You have to figure out for yourself how to set such a record with your own DNS provider but here are the details:

Have your CNAME record point to dl.dropbox.com.

Now, every time you acquire a link to share a public dropbox ressource and your request is blocked by some entity in your network, you can exchange the host to use a different, hopefully unfiltered domain name and still access that file.

In this example the following link to my public resume looks like this:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2027652/hosted/codingmerc/jobs/Resume-Michael-Henke.pdf

The modified version will look like this:

http://dropbox.codingmerc.com/u/2027652/hosted/codingmerc/jobs/Resume-Michael-Henke.pdf

Note that you would need to give up HTTPS security for this to work because the security certificate served by the dropbox download servers obviously states a different host name. 02/06/2013

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