ssb-dns

It's fairly easy to serve dns from a nodejs process.

scuttlebot makes it easy to work with a peer-to-peer log store.

So let's mash them together.

What could go wrong?

Installation

Via npm:

npm i -g ssb-dns;

Or via git:

git clone https://github.com/ansuz/ssb-dns;
cd ssb-dns;
npm i -g;

Usage

ssb-dns assumes that you have a scuttlebot instance running. You can find out more about scuttlebot here.

Publish a record

NOTE:So far the publishing script is hardcoded to reject records which don't end in .ssb.

This was cSmith's idea.

In the future this might be genralized to squat even more TLDs, or to simply be unopinionated about them.

ssb-dns publish [{prev record key}...] {domain name} {record type} {value} [optionally add a dns class]

To replace some existing ssb-dns records, pass their ssb message id(s) as the first arguments to the publish command. To append a record to the set of existing records, omit the message ids.

To replace all existing records for a name+type+class, use update:

ssb-dns update {domain name} {record type} {value} [optionally add a dns class]

Fetch a record

First launch the server in one terminal:

ssb-dns server {port: 53053} {host: 127.0.0.1}

Then query it for a record:

dig @localhost -p 53053 {name} {type}

FAQ

Can I use this without running scuttlebot?

You could get a friend to host ssb-dns for you if you really trust them. Once running, you should be able to use the dns server as you would any other dns provider.

Is it Enterprise-Ready?

Hell no. It barely works

Does it protect against name-squatting?

Not even a little bit.

Does it resolve conflicts if they occur?

Not yet.

What is it good for?

1. If there is a DNS outage you can still resolve any you or your friends have published to ssb
2. If you don't have access to the internet at all, this will continue to work (for some definition of work)
3. You can use this as a kind of distributed hosts file

How optimized is this?

Not much, but it should get better over time if people are interested in using it.