Pintle is a forwarding DNS server. In naval parlance a pintle is the connecting piece on the rudder that holds it into the gudgeon. Having a rudder is a cornerstone of navigation and direction. A pintle is a fundamental glue piece in providing the rudder and so, pintle helps you safely navigate the internet by providing correct direction to name servers.
Against my better judgement I have decided to follow up my smash-hit gudgeon with a Java version. Golang never felt like it had the tooling or the structures to support what I wanted to do and the number of bugs continued to grow and grow.
The story of gudgeon (and, thus, pintle) starts back when my children were first starting to use devices that were connected to the real internet. There was also a need to translate certain domain names to specific IPs on a consistent basis like sending all google search traffic from certain computers to the google safe-search IP. I also wanted a way to combine different blocking behavior with different devices. I also wanted to be able to block different types of advertisements based on different device characteristics. Then came the problem of IoT devices and separating that traffic from the rest. I also wanted to be able to split my traffic across different providers and use TLS/SSL to resolve queries all in the name of privacy. Finally, I wanted to ensure that traffic to my ISP's servers went through the ISP's DNS system. This allows automatic login in some cases.
Since I am not a BIND wizard this meant creating a DNS server that was built for these purposes first and not created from different off-the-shelf products. It needed to be designed as a blocking forwarder from the ground up. (Apparently I think I am a Java wizard...)
Pintle is built on top of Quarkus and uses Quarkus and Smallrye features to manage redundancy and resiliancy. It makes full use of many of the standards provided by Quarkus including JAX-RS and JPA. It also uses a lot of Ver.x features like the in-memory event bus and reactive-based sockets. Pintle also makes use of other features like Smallrye fault-tolerance and configuration providers.
The basic operation of Pintle is that it recieves a DNS message packet on one of the listeners (tcp or udp) and then it sends it as a message between different event handlers. These handlers are each responsible for both handling a certain stage (caching, blocking, resolution, etc) and coordinating with the next stage in the DNS resolving pipeline. When a resolution completes the results are logged and statistics are tabulated (if those features are enabled).
TODO: get actual installation procedures, quarkus-app, uber-jar, native, deb, rpm, etc.
- JDK 21 (I use mandrel 23.1.r21)
- Maven 3.8.6 (required by Quarkus 3.4.2)
You will need to build and install the extensions in the ./extensions folder first. To
do this simply change directories into each and run mvn clean install.
[]$ mvn clean quarkus:dev -Dquarkus.args='-c sample-config.yml'[]$ mvn clean install[]$ mvn clean install -Pnative