DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) is a DNS standard that allows sets of services and resources to be easily published, browsed and accessed over a network. It is a standard most commonly used in local networks to discover nearby printers, scanners and other resources over multicast DNS (which Apple refers to as Bonjour or Rendezvous). However, the standard also specifies how Service Discovery is defined for use in the Global DNS infrastructure.

Just as DNS A records map IP addresses to domain names, DNS LOC records map GPS coordinates to a domain name. We have an early prototype for a browser-based sig0namectl resource location app. The current version renders GPS coordinates of each resource entered within a browsing domain. Each sig0 key can create a list of known resources and add DNS LOC records to record their current location. We have also developed helper applications for devices connected to a GPS unit to update their own coordinates in real time.

With all the team present in Berlin, we took the opportunity to hold an informal team meeting outside the P4P conference held at offline.place, a community space in Berlin. Afterwards Mathias Jud gave a lightning talk for the sig0namectl project. A get-together for local first protocols, the event was well attended by distributed crypto application developers (including Secure Scuttlebutt). Mathias’ sig0namectl lightning talk generated a good amount of interest amongst the participants.

During 2002-3, around the time Freifunk was forming, a group of early open wifi hackers, activists and activists from London & Berlin came together to exchange knowledge and experience in building and establishing Community Wireless Networks. A document, the PicoPeering Agreement, was co-authored to state expectations and obligations in participating in a community network and to facilitate further wider connectivity. Today, Freifunk and many other community networks around the world use the PicoPeering Agreement as a foundational document for their activities.

‘Freifunk’ is the largest community wireless network in Germany with many thousands of participants across the country. Freifunk participants have no easy way to offer and find online resources within the local network. sig0namectl is a standards-based solution designed to solve that issue! Marlen Caemmerer (a.k.a. nosy), DNS administrator at Freifunk, joined Mathias Jud and Adam Burns from the sig0namectl project to announce the beta deployment of sig0namectl at beta.freifunk.net.

🚧 Work in progress sig0namectl is a proof of concept set of tools that enable a secure, direct & scalable standard SIG(0) key based authentication to allow users to manage & further delegate update rights to DNS resource records within compatibly configured DNSSEC enabled zones. 📝 Prepare Install dependencies. To keep extra dependencies to a minimum and to allow use in constrained environments, these tools are implemented in Bash and use a subset of BIND9 DNS tools.