Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Testnet DNS seed

From: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 11:14:02 -0500

On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 5:27 AM, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 09:23:28PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 2:01 AM, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> > Everything is running on a dedicated Amazon EC2 micro instance. Just
>> > IPv4 is supported right now as EC2 doesn't support IPv6; even tunnels
>> > are broken. I also haven't setup tor yet. I can do both if there is
>> > demand.
>>
>> How long do you plan to run this?  Indefinitely [presuming there is
>> interest and users]?
>
> Indefinitely. It's a pretty cheap thing to run, about $7.5/month. If
> anyone else wants I can give them a machine image copy easily too.

Cool.  ACK on adding your seed to the ref client.

>> > Also, FWIW, it looks like the pnSeed list is way out of date...
>>
>> Yes.  Usually nanotube does the update when poked.  That can happen,
>> or something different.
>>
>> A nice alternative might be a simple script that transforms Pieter's
>> seeds.txt into pnSeed[]
>
> seed.txt? You mean the dumpfile produced by bitcoin-seeder? That has

Correct.

> uptime info, although only a months worth if I understand it correctly.
>
> pnSeed probably should be filtered with SORB's dynamic ip list or
> similar too, and additionally add an expiry time. (1 year?)

That's fine.  The main point was to create something scripted and
repeatable.  Then pnSeed[] becomes easier to maintain _and_ easier to
audit.  Right now it is a bit opaque with a list of hex constants.  A
script or makefile rule could do

     cd src
     ../contrib/gen-seeds.py > seeds.h

and seeds might look like

  #ifndef __SEEDS_AUTOGEN_H__ etc.

  unsigned int pnSeed[] = {
    0xABCD1234, /* IP addr 12.34.56.78 */
  };

I think Satoshi liked them opaque and not easily searchable, so
printing the readable IP address in a comment may not be desired.
Anyway, that output would make updating the list more transparent and
easy to maintain.

-- 
Jeff Garzik
exMULTI, Inc.
[email-masked]