How to run dns seeder?

Question

Are there any tutorials on how to setup dnsseeder for a new altcoin. I am struggling with this for past couple of days.

I am modifying dogecoin seeder and i just cant setup on my server. My coin daemon is running on the same AWS server. I did open the ports 53 and for daemon and rpc. I only have one ip running both daemon and dnsseed. My understanding is that the more nodes connect to dnsseed, it will auto add the nodes to its dns list.

i have set this on godaddy records

dnsseed.example.com -> IP 

and IP is running dnsseeder.

Here i run

./dnsseed -h dnsseed.example.com -n IP

and i see this

Supporting whitelisted filters: 0x1,0x5,0x9,0xd
No e-mail address set. Please use -m.

When i check whether dnsseed is running,

netstat -anp

I could not find any process listening on port 53.

How do i check if dnsseed is running? Thank you for your time as i find this topic confusing.

Answer 1

DNS Seeders are not regular coin nodes but rather servers running a customized DNS binary. They do crawl a coin's P2P network and keep a list of currently live nodes to give as an answer when queried about a domain name. This is great, because instead of a DNS server with a list of fixed IP addresses (where people promised to maintain nodes at), this dynamic DNS Seeder answers queries with many IP's of coin nodes that are really live at the time and actually do have their incoming ports open

There is no requirement to run a coin daemon on the same machine where the DNS Seeder is running, but it's OK if you do.

There is a tutorial at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=599623.0

The original DNS Seeder software was written and is maintained by Sipa (Peter Wuille). I think most others are derived from his. You can find it here: https://github.com/sipa/bitcoin-seeder

The best way to check if your DNS Seeder is answering requests is to use a DNS tool such as 'dig' or 'nslookup'. If it works, you will get a list of active nodes in your coin's P2P network.

Example:

$ nslookup seed.bitcoin.sipa.be

Server:         8.8.8.8
Address:        8.8.8.8#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   seed.bitcoin.sipa.be
Address: 2.154.184.130
Name:   seed.bitcoin.sipa.be
Address: 188.194.135.136
Name:   seed.bitcoin.sipa.be
Address: 65.95.168.76

..... (many more answers)

Name:   seed.bitcoin.sipa.be
Address: 46.166.164.223
Name:   seed.bitcoin.sipa.be
Address: 81.247.189.92

It looks like you had an extra space in your DNS seeder invocation ( -h ); you can also get rid of the email warning by adding an optional email address of the DNS Seeder admin:

./dnsseed -h dnsseed.example.com -n IP -m admin@my-coin.com

Answer 2

I realize this question is a couple years old, but a proper tutorial has never been written until now. The tutorial is somewhat large, so I won't re-post it here, but I wrote a step-by-step guide for setting up a DNS seeder that you can find permanently hosted here: https://github.com/team-exor/generic-seeder/blob/master/SETUP.md.

The instructions are written for a clone of the original bitcoin-seeder called the generic-seeder, which is a modified clone of the bitcoin-seeder that makes it easier to set up a DNS seed for virtually any alt coin by using a config file.

As far as why your seeder isn't working, part of it seems to be because you may not have created the proper DNS records. You say that you created:

dnsseed.example.com -> IP

but it should look more like this:

dnsseed.example.com -> vps.example.com -> IP

vps.example.com: "A" record that points to your server IP address
dnsseed.example.com: NS record that points to your "A" record (vps.example.com)

Once your two DNS entries are created, you can run the seeder app like this:

./dnsseed -h dnsseed.example.com -n vps.example.com -m test@example.com

test@example.com: this can be any email address and is only used to serve SOA record data from the local DNS server that the DNS seeder app is creating.

Full disclosure if it wasn't already obvious: I am the author of the generic-seeder.