DNS in a FreedomBox network

Rationale

For different reasons, it might be useful to have other ways to contact a FreedomBox than using Tor's hidden service onion names, or plain IP. DNS is the first protocol that comes to mind when it comes to that kind of problem.

DNS is an important piece of the Internet, yet it is certainly centralized. As it has been seen in the past, it is thus easy to shutdown a domain and make it difficult for people to find the content it was hosting.

Traditional DNS

This section is about integrating FreedomBox with traditional DNS under the assumption that most of Internet users do not have easy access to any alternative DNS.

FreedomBox owners might be people that don't have a reliable internet access, need to move their box often, or whose IP address is changed often.

The FreedomBox network should thus be able to support DNS and provide a reliable way for owners of a FreedomBox to have an accessible domain name for their box, as well as a way to update their domain information in a secure way. Efforts should be made so that this service is hard to shutdown, or domain names hard to remove.

There are only few options to provide Dynamic DNS.

Free or paid DDNS services

Pros: Reliable; relatively easy to update using ez-ipupdate; can provide free subdomains

Cons: Centralized services more vulnerable to filtering and legal pressure

Serving DNS from another box

Pros: Partially distributed and under user's control

Cons: Requires friends with statically addressed boxes; requires a degree of trust; no DDNS server is packaged in Debian

Candidates: nsupdate.info

Community-run DDNS service

None exists.

Alternative DNS projects

okTurtles / DNSChain http://okturtles.com/

An altenative DNS Root http://www.opennicproject.org

Dot-Bit P2P DNS http://www.dot-bit.org


CategoryFreedomBox