Twister-seeder

Twister-seeder is a crawler for the Twister (github) network, which exposes a list of reliable nodes via a built-in DNS server.

Code based on Bitcoin-seeder.

Features:

• regularly revisits known nodes to check their availability
• bans nodes after enough failures, or bad behaviour
• accepts nodes down to v0.3.19 to request new IP addresses from, but only reports good post-v0.3.24 nodes.
• keeps statistics over (exponential) windows of 2 hours, 8 hours, 1 day and 1 week, to base decisions on.
• very low memory (a few tens of megabytes) and cpu requirements.
• crawlers run in parallel (by default 96 threads simultaneously).

USAGE

Using of it is highly appreciated. If you have a 24×7 machine and you are able to add an special NS record to your domain, please consider running twister-seeder. Then let @miguelfreitas know and he will add your domain to the code base.

Assuming you want to run a dns seed on dnsseed.example.com, you will need an authorative NS record in example.com's domain record, pointing to for example vps.example.com:

dig -t NS dnsseed.example.com

As answer you should get something like this:

dnsseed.example.com. 86400 IN NS vps.example.com.

On the system vps.example.com, you can now run dnsseed:

./dnsseed -h dnsseed.example.com -n vps.example.com

If you want the DNS server to report SOA records, please provide an e-mailadres (with the @ part replaced by .) using -m.

RUNNING AS NON-ROOT

Typically, you'll need root privileges to listen to port 53 (name service).

One solution is using an iptables rule (Linux only) to redirect it to a non-privileged port:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p udp --dport 53 -j REDIRECT --to-port 5353

If properly configured, this will allow you to run dnsseed in userspace, using the -p 5353 option.