Setup Private Dns With Open Nic Servers

DNS is one of the low hanging fruits which can be misused for control and tracking. New to Open NIC's DNS it looks great. Do they have support for DNScrypt ?

I have a dedicated DNS and was playing with it for a while https://freebird.dev/the-extend-of-ad-tracking/

We should promote:

- few dedicated DNS servers like Open NIC
- Encrypted DNS (not sure TLS or DNScrypt any pointers ?)

There used to be OpenNIC nameservers run by a guy in India, but it seems to have been removed within the last year. Does anyone know what happened to him by any chance?

Looks like there's a new Tier 2 OpenNIC DNS Server in india, supports DNS over TLS
https://servers.opennicproject.org/edit.php?srv=ns2.in.dns.opennic.glue

What do you think of setting up OpenNIC based DNS lookups on servers hosting FSCI operated services?

OpenNIC is a good initiative, but it requires widespread adoption to be usable. Even if we don't have the resources to campaign for OpenNIC right now, simply having support for it is a relatively easy way to provide baseline support for the network. For example, it would allow email or XMPP servers on OpenNIC domains to federate with ours. This would make it slightly more practically feasible for others to run a service on an OpenNIC domain, and the more servers we get to support this, the easier it will become.

We can continue to keep our existing DNS servers as a fallback so that the service does not get disrupted when an OpenNIC server we are using goes down.

@Badri Sunderarajan I read the Tier 2 guide and it seems low-resource except we have to monitor it and ensure there's no DDoS and block any attacks (unless we want 20Mb/s attacks for months).

Generally, I think FSCI should have a consensus on how we start projects as experimental and set a review date and decide to either maintain it or decommission it after a set period (say 3 months).

@Akshay my proposal was to use an existing OpenNIC server for domain lookups, not to run our own DNS.

@Badri Sunderarajan oh. LOL. My bad. That sounds very low risk. We can get a no-objection vote and go ahead with a possible monitoring plan

@Akshay sure. I do agree about that experiment/consensus/timeline thing in general though; maybe we can start a separate thread about that.

@Badri Sunderarajan It would be a cool idea. I am planning to setup OpenNIC based lookups on my homelab (eventually)

There are a few other peer to peer community networks that could be setup, mainly Tor, I2P, and Yggdrasil. Of course we don't need to do them, but they seem purely interesting/adjacent.

@Akshay we don't have one defined process right now, generally it happens when someone volunteers to setup one and raises funds for it.

But this has not been working very well. So we should define some process.

At minimum, volunteers and funds have to present, may be funds to run for six months at least to start.