We were fortunate to win the auction for the "audius" tld on Handshake name service in May 2020. But this got us thinking - what could we use it for? We settled on building a simple resolver to map artist names to their Audius profiles, and map "audius/" to the Audius app. I (Roneil) thought it would be a great project for me to work on in our quarterly company hackathon!

Goal: resolve artistname.audius to audius.co/artistname and audius/ to audius.co/feed

The easiest way to achieve this was to run a centralized nameserver and redirect proxy in one box. I assigned the box IP to the HNS nameserver field, then set up a small DNS server / web server combo to do the name resolution and redirecting.

Ended up being a 2-3 hour project to build, debug, test, and ship, though we were blocked at the end on waiting for the HNS blockchain to confirm the nameserver change.

This simple approach could be used to get anyone up to speed easily with wildcard HNS resolution.

On ubuntu 18.04, you have to stop resolved from binding to port 53, freeing it up for us.

Follow these instructions: https://medium.com/@niktrix/getting-rid-of-systemd-resolved-consuming-port-53-605f0234f32f

(If you do not do this, running the dns server will silently fail to bind the port!)

This involves writing your own DNS nameserver that resolves any and all requests to the current local external IP.

I chose to use native-dns, a teeny DNS server implementation that seemed to support the functionality we needed here trivially, and also has an npm package.

This is a hack to implement wildcard DNS - no matter what DNS request is made to this nameserver, we always return our current public IP as an A record for the name given.

This is implemented in index.js!

Field web requests:

• if request is of form xyz.audius, send user to audius.co/xyz
• if request is of any other form, send user to audius.co/feed

Using soft (302) redirects to give us optionality in future.

And that's it!

The title explains itself here - write the public IP for this server to a nameserver field. I used namebase to do this, as the audius TLD is registered there.

Install all local dependencies after checking out this repo: npm install

Then run the server on the box by doing sudo node src/index.js (root privs necessary to bind ports 53 and 80 without fuss)

1. Support running as an actual service on the box instead of doing sudo node src/index.js and leaving it open in tmux or screen

2. It would be awesome to support different query data / query types here. What if you could pay artistname.audius?

3. This should also be decentralized. There is probably a better way to support wildcards that does not involve our jank DNS server.