Hi,
I wanted to share a gem I made and I’ve got a fun demonstration.
I was always interested in DNS clients and servers and at one point I
had a
very specific setup with servers behind an ADSL NAT connection, which
meant
that locally resolved names pointed to servers inside the NAT while
externally resolved names should point at the ADSL modem which had
appropriate VHOST rules. Thus, was born RubyDNS.
RubyDNS is an infinitely flexible DNS server which includes an
asynchronous
DNS client to ensure non-blocking behaviour when forwarding requests
upstream. It is built on EventMachine which theoretically should provide
a
good asynchronous foundation for processing DNS requests and integration
with other asynchronous systems (e.g. em-http-request).
For fun, I made an example. WikipediaDNS allows you to query wikipedia
via
DNS, e.g.:
> dig +tcp +short @ayako.oriontransfer.org computer.wikipedia TXT
“A computer is a general purpose device that can be programmed to carry
out
a finite set of arithmetic or logical operations. Since a sequence of
operations can be readily changed, the computer can solve more than one
kind of problem.”
I’m running it on my VPS (temporarily for this demonstration, don’t
expect
this to be a permanent home) and you can also run it locally, the code
is
available:
https://github.com/ioquatix/rubydns/blob/master/test/examples/wikipedia-dns.rb-
in this example, I’ve forced +tcp as udp seems to be blocked, at least
from my current location.
RubyDNS has been used in a number of interesting systems, including
Murakumo, a distributed peer-to-peer DNS system, and along side vagrant
to
provide dynamically registered DNS names for dynamically created virtual
hosts. Someone also contacted me recently about using it for full scale
network integration testing and also browser level testing of some sort.
It
was used in f***PSN, a tool for bypassing the PSN network, and has been
also used in SiriProxy (I’m sure you can guess what it does).
I’d love to share RubyDNS with the hope that I see more interesting
projects developed on top of it. I get really excited thinking about all
the possibilities. For example it would be really interesting to make a
client-server architecture for sending data via DNS, perhaps some kind
of
DNS port knocking security system, better integration of information
systems with DNS (e.g. mapping “document database” to DNS records).
Source code is available: GitHub - socketry/rubydns: A DSL for building fun, high-performance DNS servers.
Project home page with introduction video and documentation:
http://www.codeotaku.com/projects/rubydns/index.en
Kind regards,
Samuel
