Crown DNS seeds up and running again
After quite a few trials and tribulations the infra team have got the DNS seeds working again.
In this article I will explain what role they fulfil in the Crown Blockchain network.
I will start by explaining the difference between seednodes and DNS seeds and continue on to how they function with a normal node.
What is a seednode?
A seednode is any node that is used to seed the network. It is a node that is first contacted to get network information, either manually or automated. All crown nodes can be used as seednodes. Adding the seednodes to the crown wallet makes them first ask that particular node for blocks. This can be done in either the code or by using the addnode command.
What makes a DNS seed special?
A DNS seed is a program that is run 24/7 and all it does is ask nodes in the network if they are online, which version they run and what block they are on. From this it makes a database which keeps track of the uptime of the node and when it was last seen. These DNS seednodes are coded into the wallet to be asked for working crown nodes.
How does the DNS seed give out IP’s?
The question and answer between the crown wallet/systemnode/masternode works by a DNS request being sent to for example “europe-01seedns.crowncoin.org”.
The DNS seed answers with a random list of nodes that have the highest uptime in the past 7 days.
Looking purely at the answer to the request it looks as follows:
These IP’s in the form of A records are then taken by the requesting node and checked if a connection can be made (sometimes due to the node being far away and high ping etc. it doesn’t take all).
Hopefully you’ve learned something today!
The Infra-Team is happy to have solved this issue and you can contact us on Discord: Edward Morra#5387 and pjcltd | NodeMasters.co.uk#2105).
Find out more about the code of the DNS seeder on our Gitlab:
Find out more about Crown and chat with our contributors on Discord and Telegram.
