dns: A C repository from zcnet4

Home Page

This project's home page and main repository is located at http://25thandClement.com/~william/projects/dns.c.html.

But feel free to rely on Github for tracking the source tree.

Description

A non-blocking DNS resolver library in a single .c file.

No dependencies!
Supports both stub and recursive modes.
No event callbacks! Callbacks are usually inevitable when writing non-blocking network software, but when too many libraries introduce too many callback interfaces code quickly becomes incomprehensible beyond necessity. dns.c requires no particular callback scheme, nor enforces callbacks at all. That makes it easy to use and embed within other components.
Works with any event loop. All resolver objects support three common methods: pollfd, events, and timeout.
Core DNS API built around actual DNS packet; as generic as DNS itself. This makes querying and manipulating records other than A, AAAA, and PTR much easier, yet with similar simplicity as API's which make annoying assumptions.
Type-specific interfaces for A, AAAA, CNAME, NS, SOA, PTR, MX, TXT, SRV, SSHFP, and SPF records.
Restartable record iterators with user-specified sorting. Iterate over MX or SRV records in semantic order (i.e. preference and priority) using a single dns_rr_foreach loop. Interruptible loops supported with dns_rr_grep.
Thoughtful /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/nsswitch.conf, and /etc/hosts integration. Easy to change system defaults, or to skip entirely.
getaddrinfo-like auxiliary interface.
Pluggable cache interface. Application can specify a synchronous or asynchronous local cache for use by the core resolver.
"Smart" queries which automatically dereference NS, MX, SRV, PTR, etc. to A or AAAA records. Recursing, caching nameservers don't usually do this explicitly, but merely rely on the authoritative server to include glue, which won't exist for out-of-bailiwick references (very common these days). This means software must do two separate logical DNS operations; a headache when patching software which only supported A lookups. Smart queries are available with a flag to the core resolver-—in both stub and recursive modes—-and more efficiently with the built-in getaddrinfo-like auxiliary interface.
Randomized source ports and encrypted QIDs using a 16-bit Feistel block cipher. User specifiable entropy source. Defaults to arc4random where available; knows how to use OpenSSL RAND_bytes if specified during the build (-DDNS_RANDOM=RAND_bytes).
Statistics interface. Retrieve count of packets and bytes, sent and received; and number of queries processed.
Used successfully by many projects for many years, including several Silicon Valley giants.
Regularly testing on Linux, OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Solaris. Occassionally tested in MinGW environment. Builds with GCC, Clang, and SunPro.

spf.c

Asynchronous SPF resolver--no threading, no forking, no callbacks, no library dependencies.

A single source file. Requires Ragel precompiler, but no run-time dependencies other than dns.c. The Ragel translation can be done once and the result stored if you don't plan on hacking spf.c.
Passes over 90% of OpenSPF test suite. 100% test suite compliance is not the goal, as some tests are fairly debatable. (The SPF specification has some bugs.)
Used successfully in countless MTA installations and for billions (trillions?) of queries.

Build

dns.c is intended to be dropped into existing project builds. The included Makefile is mostly for development and testing.

Usage

Until the API is properly documented you must rely on the source code. The header, dns.h, and the API is fairly straight-forward, with each object implementating a simple, consistent, and hopefully self-explanatory pattern.

The last 1/6 of dns.c implements a command-line utility and a full regression testing suite permitting each component to be tested individually. This is excellent usage documentation as well.

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.