[announce] Namecoin - a distributed naming system based on Bitcoin

[grue]

#namecoin on Freenode

fail
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=witcoin&uio=d4

[1713933854]

1713933854

[1713933854]

1713933854

[1713933854]

1713933854

[grue]

Let's make this system without extension.  They have been an unnecessary overhead anyway.

So just 'google' instead of 'google.com'

Another incentive for people to adopt it.

+1

So Trends would be http://trends.google ?

it will fail miserably when someone registers "com", "net", etc.

[mizerydearia]

#namecoin on Freenode

fail
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=carrot&uio=d4

heh, fixed

[memvola]

Let's make this system without extension.  They have been an unnecessary overhead anyway.

So just 'google' instead of 'google.com'

Another incentive for people to adopt it.

+1

So Trends would be http://trends.google ?

it will fail miserably when someone registers "com", "net", etc.

(Sorry, I deleted my first reply.)

I already suggested this as one of the options, i.e. names act as TLDs. DNS servers need to recurse first and then check the names in the blockchain, though only for ICANN and maybe OpenNIC TLDs. That way, ICANN's "google.com" takes precedence over our "com" and "google.com" but maybe not "sillyname9999.com".

But this idea is prone to other messy situations. Separating namecoin names is always a good idea. For instance, if an alternative to namecoin comes along, they can live together side by side.

EDIT: Plus, I nominate ".c" as the standard TLD. I think it's more catchy than .b and .n and would look better on a billboard than .bit. It strangely resembles .com and .co but is neither, and probably won't be adopted by ICANN anytime soon. "c" also has a professional look, probably because .com and © and some other IT related stuff.

[doublec]

Until a DNS proxy that uses namecoin comes along, one approach to using namecoin for host name lookups could be to provide the option to scan the names every time a block is mined and update/rewrite the users /etc/hosts (or windows equivalent). This might be a quick way of starting to use the namecoin chain for lookups. Even a simple script that does this every 10 minutes or so, getting the names from namecoind via RPC would do a reasonable job.

[grue]

kind of a noob question:
is there a way to see blocks that are maturing (less than 100 confirmations)? I've mined several blocks ("accepted" in poclm), but it's not showing up in my balance, nor is it showing up in my transactions list.

[Garrett Burgwardt]

kind of a noob question:
is there a way to see blocks that are maturing (less than 100 confirmations)? I've mined several blocks ("accepted" in poclm), but it's not showing up in my balance, nor is it showing up in my transactions list.

I'll second this.

[doublec]

Until a DNS proxy that uses namecoin comes along, one approach to using namecoin for host name lookups could be to provide the option to scan the names every time a block is mined and update/rewrite the users /etc/hosts (or windows equivalent). This might be a quick way of starting to use the namecoin chain for lookups. Even a simple script that does this every 10 minutes or so, getting the names from namecoind via RPC would do a reasonable job.

An option for using socks enabled programs is to use ncproxy combined with SSH. SSH to localhost using the '-D' option to set up a socks proxy. 

Code:

$ ssh -Dn 2001 user@locahost &
$ ncproxy --user=namecoind-user --password=namecoind-password -p 9055 -s 127.0.0.1:2001

This sets up ncproxy to forward to the SSH proxy. You can configure firefox to use this socks proxy by going into 'Preferences/Advanced/Network/Settings' and adding '127.0.0.1' and '9055' in the Socks proxy area. You should also go into 'about:config' in Firefox, search for net.proxy.socks_remote_dns and double click on it to set it to true. This will cause DNS requests to go through ncproxy and then the SSH socks proxy.

You can also slip polipo in there if you want a web cache. Run:

Code:

$ ssh -Dn 2001 user@locahost &
$ ncproxy --user=namecoind-user --password=namecoind-password -p 9055 -s 127.0.0.1:2001
$ ./polipo socksParentProxy=localhost:9055

Configure firefox to use the HTTP proxy on port 9055 instead of a socks proxy.

These approaches seem to work in that name lookups occur. Unfortunately there appear to  be no namecoin entries with the JSON format to actually see if ncproxy is doing the job.

[doublec]

I hacked a bit on the polipo HTTP proxy code and added simple namecoin support for DNS lookups. The modified code is in this git repository: https://github.com/doublec/namecoin-polipo. It needs libjansson for JSON parsing and libcurl for talking to the namecoind JSON-RPC server.

Once compiled, you can run it passing it the details about the namecoind server:

Code:

$ git clone https://github.com/doublec/namecoin-polipo
$ cd namecoin-polipo
$ make
$ ./polipo namecoindServer="127.0.0.1:8332" namecoindUsername=rpcuser namecoindPassword=rpcpassword

This will start the proxy, and it'll connect to the namecoind JSON-RPC server with the given details. It runs 'name_scan' to get the list of names. Any program using this proxy will have all .bit domains resolved by namecoind. Currently it only supports mapping to IP addresses. So namecoind values like the following work: {"map":{"":"192.0.32.10"}}. As an example 'bluishcoder.bit' hopefully resolves to the IP address of my server with my weblog using this version of polipo. It rescans namecoind when a request is made for a domain lookup and the last scan was more than 10 minutes ago. 

To use it with Firefox (or other browsers) go into the network settings and set the 'http proxy' to localhost, port 8123.

I decided to do this to avoid needing to run the ncproxy script since I don't need socks support. Comments, suggestions, patches are welcome.

[vinced]

@memvola and others that have namecoins held up by a firstupdate on a name that'
s already taken.  I pushed a new version to github.  It has a new command

Code:

name_clean

that will clear these transactions.

The symptoms include having transactions that won't confirm.

@doublec thanks for the modified polipo.  What do you think about a modified resolver library that allows "sideloading"?  How about this in /etc/resolv.conf:

Code:

tldserver <tld> <ip>

and

Code:

socksserver <tld> <socksip>:<socksport>

Oh and I should have used double quotes in my examples like you have it.

[doublec]

@doublec thanks for the modified polipo.  What do you think about a modified resolver library that allows "sideloading"?  How about this in /etc/resolv.conf:

I don't know much about DNS so avoided modifying or using any existing DNS code. What I have been able to do is get 'dnsmasq' to serve namecoind names using a standard dnsmasq build. eg. try:

Code:

dig @cd.pn bluishcoder.bit

This seems to work well. What I did was write a small program that does a name_scan and prints out the valid mappings in the same format as /etc/hosts. I then run dnsmasq with the option for obtaining names from this file. I have a script that runs every 5 minutes that rewrites this file and sends a SIGHUP to dnsmasq. The program to generate the hostfile is namecoin-hosts.c. It needs libjansson and libcurl. It can be built with:

Code:

gcc -o namecoin-hosts namecoin-hosts.c -lcurl -ljansson

The entries I changed in my dnsmasq.conf were:

Code:

local=/.bit/
local-ttl=300 
addn-hosts=/tmp/hosts.txt

I have a simple shell script that does the updating:

Code:

while true; do
  ./namecoin-hosts 127.0.0.1:8332 rpcuser rpcpassword >/tmp/hosts.txt
  kill -HUP `cat /var/run/dnsmasq/dnsmasq.pid`
  echo `date`
  sleep 300
done

[caston]

OK I have some stupid questions:

I am running Kubuntu 64 bit and installed the 64 bit binairies and set a rpcpassword in the bitcoin.conf file

I get the following with namecoin.d /getinfo

{
    "version" : 32100,
    "balance" : 0.00000000,
    "blocks" : 1318,
    "connections" : 5,
    "proxy" : "",
    "generate" : false,
    "genproclimit" : -1,
    "difficulty" : 512.00781274,
    "hashespersec" : 0,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1304128826,
    "paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
    "errors" : ""
}

How do I get it to generate and how do I get a name coin address?

Then if I want to start GPU mining namecoins is there a guide or do I just use one of the bitcoin GPU mining guides and make a few changes?

[grue]

OK I have some stupid questions:

I am running Kubuntu 64 bit and installed the 64 bit binairies and set a rpcpassword in the bitcoin.conf file

I get the following with namecoin.d /getinfo

{
    "version" : 32100,
    "balance" : 0.00000000,
    "blocks" : 1318,
    "connections" : 5,
    "proxy" : "",
    "generate" : false,
    "genproclimit" : -1,
    "difficulty" : 512.00781274,
    "hashespersec" : 0,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1304128826,
    "paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
    "errors" : ""
}

How do I get it to generate and how do I get a name coin address?

Then if I want to start GPU mining namecoins is there a guide or do I just use one of the bitcoin GPU mining guides and make a few changes?

any rpc miner that works with bitcoin should work with namecoin.

[caston]

Thank you. I also got it generating by using:


./namecoind setgenerate true

The other question is how do I get a namecoin address so I can buy my first name coins?

[doublec]

The other question is how do I get a namecoin address so I can buy my first name coins?

It works exactly like bitcoind. So:

Code:

namecoind getnewaddress

[caston]

Thank you.

I have gone out and bought a ATI Radeon HD 5770 card to cut my teeth on. 

I've been trying the guide:

Easy Ubuntu python OpenCL mining setup
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2636.0

I have installed kubuntu 10.4 64 bit and installed the proprietary driver using   K > Applications > System > Additional drivers

I downloaded namecoin binaries and extracted them to the folder "namecoin" under ~/Downloads


I downloaded AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64.tgz and installed it using the instructions in pdf but still get errors  (CL_PLATFORM_NOT_FOUND_KHR) trying to run the samples
I did that command to check .so files but none were missing.

I copied the code from the example but tried to change a few things to namecoin  instead of bitcoin but ended up with a .namecoin folder in my home directory whereas the namecoind binary is in a folder under downloads.

e.g.

sudo apt-get install python-pyopencl subversion

svn checkout http://svn.json-rpc.org/trunk/python-jsonrpc
cd python-jsonrpc/
sudo python setup.py install
cd ..
mkdir .namecoin
echo "rpcuser=un" > .bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
echo "rpcpassword=pw" >> .bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm/raw/master/BitcoinMiner.cl
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm/raw/master/BitcoinMiner.py
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm/raw/master/poclbm.py

I have probably done a million things wrong but here is what I get when I type:



./namecoind -server&python poclbm.py -d 0 --user un --pass pw


[1] 4753
bitcoin server starting
python: can't open file 'poclbm.py': [Errno 2] No such file or directory

this is the directory listing of:

~/.namecoin$ ls
addr.dat    bitcoin.conf     BitcoinMiner.py  blkindex.dat  __db.001  __db.003  __db.005  db.log     nameindex.dat  wallet.dat
bitcoin.co  BitcoinMiner.cl  blk0001.dat      database      __db.002  __db.004  __db.006  debug.log  poclbm.py

and:

/Downloads/namecoin$ ls
base58.h        coding.txt  DESIGN-namecoin.md  init.cpp  key.h        makefile        namecoin.cpp  noui.h             rpc.cpp      setup.nsi      uibase.h       ui.rc
bignum.h        contrib     docs                init.h    license.txt  makefile.mingw  namecoind     obj                rpc.h        sha256.cpp     ui.cpp         util.cpp
build-msw.txt   cryptopp    headers.h           irc.cpp   locale       makefile.osx    namecoin.h    rc                 script.cpp   strlcpy.h      ui.h           util.h
build-osx.txt   db.cpp      hook.cpp            irc.h     main.cpp     makefile.unix   net.cpp       README-bitcoin.md  script.h     TODO-namecoin  uint256.h      xpm
build-unix.txt  db.h        hook.h              json      main.h       makefile.vc     net.h         README.md          serialize.h  uibase.cpp     uiproject.fbp


Any ideas or more questions would be much appreciated. I wish I had of known about this at easter time so I could have worked on it then!

[grue]

help?

[xf2_org]

Thank you. I also got it generating by using:


./namecoind setgenerate true

This is the slow way to generate.  Use an external CPU miner for greater efficiency.

[bitanarchy]

Considering the following discussion,
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2699.0
did you choose a different elliptic curve for namecoin than the secp256k1 to reduce possible change of intrusion into bitcoin security by, for example the NSA.
It would ease my concerns a lot if satoshi would make himself public, so that he could explain why he chose that particular curve...

[caston]

I'm trying again using this post for more ideas:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3359.msg47174#msg47174

and it is the latest kubuntu 11.04  I think as I downloaded it yesterday

I already found one thing that the icd-registration.tgz didn't go into the root directory when I was trying it last night so hopefully that will fix (or help fix) that other issue I had with not being able to run the samples.