Silk-Seeder
===========

Silk-Seeder crawls the Silk network in order to assemble a list
of reliable nodes via its own built-in DNS server.

Features:
* Regularly revisits known nodes to check their availability
* Bans nodes after enough failures, or bad behaviour
* Accepts nodes running, at the least, v1.0.0.0 to request new IP addresses from,
  but it only reports "good" nodes; defined as nodes that run the latest release, v1.0.0.0.
* 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).

REQUIREMENTS
------------

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libboost-all-dev libssl-dev

USAGE
-----

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

;; ANSWER SECTION
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.

COMPILING
---------
Compiling will require boost and ssl.  On debian systems, these are provided
by `libboost-dev` and `libssl-dev` respectively.

$ make

This will produce the `dnsseed` binary.


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.