Prototype registry software available

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

I've been in the woodshed in my spare time, trying to implement the 
ideas I have for shared registries.  I now have a  prototype package 
available for people to look at.  I've built it at one time or another 
on Linux, HPUX, and Solaris, though most of the testing has been done 
on Linux and HPUX.  

I intend for this stuff to be freely available, though I am not sure 
what would be the best license schema -- GPL, Artistic, BSD, etc.

The package includes a registrar client program (rc), a master 
coordination daemon (mr), a dns update daemon (dnsd), a rudimentary zone 
db file munger (dbud), a rudimentary program for extracting contact 
data from dns (cdat), and some other stuff.  It runs pgp to sign the
"certificates" that are used to convey transactions.

It's really pretty simple -- all told its something over 3000 lines of
C, and a production version might double that size.  It is of course
not polished or optimized -- it has just been a part time effort over
the past few weeks.  And it isn't very well tested, nor does it have a
pretty user interface.  But it does (I believe) present a relatively
complete system for managing shared registries that 1) is
non-proprietary; 2) requires very minimal hardware in a central
trusted location (depending on how DNS is configured); 3) uses a
protocol that could be standardized; 4) is pretty secure, and 5), is
based only on very widely available products (pgp and BIND).  While it
would be easy to adapt it to support some kind of central database, it
is not required -- the whole system will run out of DNS. 

Building it should be straightforward for an experienced programmer.  
Installing it and configuring it requires familiarity with pgp and 
dns administration.  Getting the various configuration files and pgp 
key files arranged takes a little work as well.

I will produce an INSTALL file over the next week or so.  The URL is

		ftp://songbird.com/pub/registry.tar

I would appreciate it if people would take a look at it and play with 
it a bit, and return constructive criticism.

Thanks.


-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov		the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E  87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F