Subject: [Bitcoin-development] DNS seeds unstable

From: Andreas Schildbach <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 13:50:29 +0200

I'm bringing this issue up again. The current Bitcoin DNS seed
infrastructure is unstable. I assume this is because of we're using a
custom DNS implementation which is not 100% compatible. There have been
bugs in the past, like a case sensitive match for the domain name.

Current state (seeds taken from bitcoinj):

mainnet:

seed.bitcoin.sipa.be			OK
dnsseed.bluematt.me			OK
dnsseed.bitcoin.dashjr.org		SERVFAIL, tried multiple ISPs
seed.bitcoinstats.com			OK

testnet:

testnet-seed.bitcoin.petertodd.org	SERVFAIL, just from Telefonica
testnet-seed.bluematt.me		OK (but only returns one node)

Note: Telefonica is one of Europe's largest ISPs.

I would try to improve DNS myself, but I'm not capable of writing C. My
"fix" would be to reimplement everything in Java -- I doubt you guys
would be happy with that.