RAINS, Another Internet Naming Service

RAINS is an alternate protocol for Internet name resolution, designed as a replacement of the Domain Name System (DNS). The current implementation of RAINS can run on SCION, and serve SCION addresses.

All of our apps can make use of RAINS to resolve hostnames, if a resolver is configured.

If you want to run your own RAINS servers, please refer to the documentation in the READMEs.

Resolver config file

Create a file /etc/scion/rains.cfg and add a line with the address of a RAINS resolver. For example, to use the RAINS resolver in the ETHZ AS in SCIONLab (which is currently not available), set this to:

17-ffaa:0:1107,[192.33.93.195]:5025

rdig

RAINS contains a commandline tool to peek at names, similar to the well known dig tool for DNS.

Setup

Build from sources, requires an installation of go (~1.13).

go get github.com/netsec-ethz/rains/cmd/rdig

Display the rdig help to learn about the parameters:

rdig --help

Making queries

Prerequisite is a running SCION end host stack.

To query a name on a RAINS resolver or name server at a known address/port, run:

rdig @<ISD-AS,IP> <name> scion -p <port>

For example, to send the a query for the name ap17.node.snet to the RAINS resolver configured above, run:

rdig @17-ffaa:0:1107,[192.33.93.195] ap17.node.snet. scion -p 5025