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j"1LAnZuoQdcKCkpDBKQMCgziGMoPC4VQUckM <div class="post">I also had an idea last night of how/where to tie this into the existing DNS.<br/><br/>When you lookup foo.com, software on your computer called a resolver is responsible. It has some caching and local data, but mostly it just asks a DNS server for the answer. You have one or more DNS servers configured as part of your network setup, and these servers respond to domain name lookup queries either directly, or by initiating their own search of the domain name system.<br/><br/>Obviously we want existing name lookups still to work. Broadly speaking, then, we would change the software to first check if a name is registered in the BitDNS system, and if not, to fall back to the regular handling.<br/><br/>My idea is that the best place to add the BitDNS lookup code is in a DNS server rather than in the resolver. Resolvers are different for every OS, so there's more work. I don't even know if the resolver logic can be changed on Windows. Plus this code is going to need to be tracking the BitDNS block chain, and not every end user should have to do this.<br/><br/>Other 'alternative' DNS systems do it like this, with one or more special DNS servers that know about their extra domains.<br/><br/>We would choose some open source DNS server as a base, fork it and add the code to lookup BitDNS names. Whether these names all have a distinguishing TLD ".bit" or whether we are more aggressive and take over more namespace, either way it could be done.<br/><br/>As I understand it, when a DNS server looks up foo.com, it finds the (or a) name server authoritative for .com, and asks it for what is called a SOA record for foo.com. This tells what name servers are authoritative for foo.com, and the DNS server then tries them to get details on foo.com.<br/><br/>We would intercept this first step, and use the BitDNS code to find the authoritative name servers. Maybe we could create a dummy SOA record to hold the data, to simplify falling back into the regular DNS code.<br/><br/>People who want to use BitDNS would just have to select one of the BitDNS aware DNS servers. Paranoids could run their own name servers locally and track the block chain. All the usual optimizations of DNS in terms of caching, distribution, etc. would work, so it would not have much negative impact on the net.</div> text/html