Newbie question about registering domains

https://www.namecoin.org/dot-bit/
barkingdoggy
Posts: 36
Joined: Thu Jul 23, 2015 7:58 pm
os: windows

Re: Newbie question about registering domains

Post by barkingdoggy »

Looking at https://github.com/khalahan/nmcontrol/releases, the latest NMcontrol release is 0.8, more than 3 years ago?

josephbisch
Posts: 69
Joined: Sun Nov 23, 2014 3:34 pm
os: linux

Re: Newbie question about registering domains

Post by josephbisch »

barkingdoggy wrote:Looking at https://github.com/khalahan/nmcontrol/releases, the latest NMcontrol release is 0.8, more than 3 years ago?
Look at https://github.com/namecoin/nmcontrol.

biolizard89
Posts: 2001
Joined: Tue Jun 05, 2012 6:25 am
os: linux

Re: Newbie question about registering domains

Post by biolizard89 »

barkingdoggy wrote:IMO, 3-rd party DNS providers are the easiest way for "non-technical" people to access .bit domains. They don't know and/or care about security and privacy.
You appear to be arguing that it is ethically okay to exploit and harm people on the grounds that they are too uneducated to know that they are being harmed until it's too late. This is a highly disturbing viewpoint. John Oliver demonstrated in a recent experiment that most people *do* care about such things, but only when the information is presented properly (in Oliver's case, by renaming the various NSA programs as the "dick pic program"). It is our job as developers to behave responsibly toward our users, even if the users are not experts in security or privacy. Recommending 3rd-party DNS providers would be counter to that responsibility.
Jeremy Rand, Lead Namecoin Application Engineer
NameID: id/jeremy
DyName: Dynamic DNS update client for .bit domains.

Donations: BTC 1EcUWRa9H6ZuWPkF3BDj6k4k1vCgv41ab8 ; NMC NFqbaS7ReiQ9MBmsowwcDSmp4iDznjmEh5

barkingdoggy
Posts: 36
Joined: Thu Jul 23, 2015 7:58 pm
os: windows

Re: Newbie question about registering domains

Post by barkingdoggy »

Oliver's bit was good. On the other hand, did you see this disturbing info: http://www.propublica.org/article/how-m ... ree-cookie ?

Security has several dimensions, accessibility being one of them. If .bit domains are not accessible for people who should have access to them, security has failed.

barkingdoggy
Posts: 36
Joined: Thu Jul 23, 2015 7:58 pm
os: windows

Re: Newbie question about registering domains

Post by barkingdoggy »

I want to install nmcontrol on a Windows 7 or Windows 10 PC. Is there a guide/script for that? FWIW, I downloaded nmcontrol-master.zip from https://github.com/namecoin/nmcontrol. I don't know what the next steps are.

biolizard89
Posts: 2001
Joined: Tue Jun 05, 2012 6:25 am
os: linux

Re: Newbie question about registering domains

Post by biolizard89 »

Oh wow, I hadn't read that ProPublica article. That's quite interesting stuff -- and yes, very disturbing how little the average person seems to know about what data they're giving away.

Yes, accessibility is very important. However, I think you may be conflating two things: the accessibility of local resolution systems like NMControl right now (which is pretty bad, especially on systems like Windows that don't have Python preinstalled), versus the accessibility that local resolution can achieve with sufficient development (which I suspect may approach quite close to the accessibility of manually editing DNS settings). Generally when my non-techie friends ask about Namecoin resolution, I tell them to wait for improved software, because we're not yet at a point where it's fully accessible.

If you already have Python 2.7.x on your Windows PC, you should be able to just run nmcontrol.py and it will start a DNS server on 127.0.0.1. There's a script in the repo that can generate a .exe from NMControl, which will then run on Windows PC's that don't have Python installed. We're not actively distributing those generated .exe files yet because there are some changes in progress for NMControl which should improve it a lot, but which will also change how the .exe is built and distributed (because it removes some dependencies and adds some others).

FWIW I haven't tried it on Windows 10. I'm curious if it works unmodified -- I think it will, but I haven't yet had a chance to fiddle with Win10.
Jeremy Rand, Lead Namecoin Application Engineer
NameID: id/jeremy
DyName: Dynamic DNS update client for .bit domains.

Donations: BTC 1EcUWRa9H6ZuWPkF3BDj6k4k1vCgv41ab8 ; NMC NFqbaS7ReiQ9MBmsowwcDSmp4iDznjmEh5

phelix
Posts: 1634
Joined: Thu Aug 18, 2011 6:59 am

Re: Newbie question about registering domains

Post by phelix »

barkingdoggy wrote:I want to install nmcontrol on a Windows 7 or Windows 10 PC. Is there a guide/script for that? FWIW, I downloaded nmcontrol-master.zip from https://github.com/namecoin/nmcontrol. I don't know what the next steps are.
You are welcome to give my nmcontrol-hyperion a try: https://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2174

On Windows 10 it should work out of the box after the installer (feedback on this would be very nice). Note that this version by defaults sends all your .bit requests to our server (which may still be better than your OpenNic solution where probably ALL your DNS requests go to OpenNic).

On Windows 7 you will have to manually change your dns server to 127.0.0.1 Also if you don't want all your legacy DNS requests be roted to Google DNS you will have to edit %APPDATA%\nmcontrol\conf\service-dns.conf with your regular DNS server address (e.g. "resolver=192.168.0.1").


Hopefully there will soon be an official installer for NMControl.
nx.bit - some namecoin stats
nf.bit - shortcut to this forum

barkingdoggy
Posts: 36
Joined: Thu Jul 23, 2015 7:58 pm
os: windows

Re: Newbie question about registering domains

Post by barkingdoggy »

Sorry for the delay... re nmcontrol-hyperion on Windows 7, you want to have Python 2.7.9 installed and you need to download and install pyinstaller to run the build_windows batch file. Double-click the nmcontrolwin.py file in Windows Explorer to generate nmcontrol.pyc. Launching nmcontrol.pyc from the command prompt works, the nmcontrol icon appears in the systray and from there you can start the httpGUI. The Main httpGUI reports,

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Plugin main running
Plugin domain running
Plugin systray running
Plugin guiHttpConfig running
Plugin rpc running
Plugin guiHttp running
Plugin dns running
Plugin data running (0 names)
Plugin guiHttpBrowser running
But in the command window, there are several problems identified. Here's the command I'm running:

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C:\Users\Keystone\Downloads\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion>nmcontrol.pyc --daemon=0 --data.import.mode=all --data.update.file=data\namecoin.dat
The output in the command window is:

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Daemon mode not possible on MS Windows.
pluginGuiHttp found menu entries: ['Main', Plugins started :'Browser']domain, systray, guiHttpConfig, guiHttp, guiHttpBrowser
Exception in thread data:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python27\lib\threading.py", line 810, in __bootstrap_inner self.run()
  File "C:\Users\Keystone\Downloads\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\lib\plugin.py", line 43, in run self.start2()
  File "C:\Users\Keystone\Downloads\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\lib\plugin.py", line 62, in start2 return self.pStart()
  File "C:\Users\Keystone\Downloads\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\plugin\pluginData.py", line 81, in pStart error, data = backend.getAllNames()
  File "C:\Users\Keystone\Downloads\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\lib\backendDataNamecoin.py", line 35, in getAllNames error, data = self._rpcSend(["name_filter", app['plugins']['data'].conf['name_filter']])
  File "C:\Users\Keystone\Downloads\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\lib\backendDataNamecoin.py", line 46, in _rpcSend self._loadRPCConfig()
  File "C:\Users\Keystone\Downloads\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\nmcontrol-nmcontrol-hyperion\lib\backendDataNamecoin.py", line 13, in _loadRPCConfig ini_str = '[r]\n' + open(self.conf).read()
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\Keystone\\AppData\\Roaming\\Namecoin\\namecoin.conf'
I have namecoin-qt installed, running and up-to-date on the machine. The blockchain is located at C:\Users\Keystone\AppData\Roaming\Namecoin\blk0001.dat. For now, Nmcontrol is not reading data from the blockchain nor writing to its namecoin.dat file. Suggestions?

cassini
Posts: 336
Joined: Sun May 26, 2013 6:36 pm

Re: Newbie question about registering domains

Post by cassini »

I'm not necessarily an MS-Windows expert but I'd have a closer look at the last line in your command window output:

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No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\Keystone\\AppData\\Roaming\\Namecoin\\namecoin.conf'
Have you actually created this file? It should contain at least two lines with rpcuser and rpcpassword respectively, e.g.:

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rpcuser=CHOOSE_A_FANCY_USERNAME
rpcpassword=CHOOSE_A_FANCY_PASSWORD

barkingdoggy
Posts: 36
Joined: Thu Jul 23, 2015 7:58 pm
os: windows

Re: Newbie question about registering domains

Post by barkingdoggy »

Thanks, Cassini, that fixes the Errno 2. Rebooting fixed the various other issues found except one (see below). NB: The only way to get nmcontrol to run cleanly following a reboot is to launch the nncontrol.pyc file generated by the build_windows batch file. Neither of the nmcontrolwin.exe files (in the build and dist folders) works, errorring finding the httpGUI plugin. Furthermore, after stopping nmcontrol I cannot restart it cleanly without rebooting the machine.

The bigger remaining problem for me from a usability perspective is that nmcontrol is not reading any names from the blockchain. In the docs, it says,

Import data from file
=====================

To generate the data file, do the following in the application folder (export is not implemented yet in nmcontrol) :

mkdir data
/path/to/namecoind name_filter > data/namecoin.dat

Configure conf/plugin-data.conf

import.mode = all
import.from = file
import.file = data/namecoin.dat


I'm running namecoin-qt version 0.3.80, and I don't see a name_filter file. Do I need to configure name_filter somewhere/somehow in namecoin.conf?

I copied the whole blockchain to data/namecoin.dat. Nmcontrol does not return an error, but the httpGUI says there are no names.

Stumped for now...

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