[GNUnet-developers] Questions regarding user discovery.

[Mike Mestnik]

Hello,
  I've made a number of assumptions that I'd like to get some feedback
about, but mainly I'm lost as to how nodes discover each other at the
application level.  I believe my main issue can be solved by
publishing gns records, but I'm totally in the dark as to how to
construct and put these.

Firstly I wonder if DHT contents can be tamper resistant, if not
proof, by using sha512 of the data as the key.
https://github.com/cheako/gnunetircd/blob/old-master/src/dht.c#L44

Then I wonder if I've correctly built and designed the DHT contents.
https://github.com/cheako/gnunetircd/blob/old-master/src/dht.c#L73
https://github.com/cheako/gnunetircd/blob/old-master/src/dht.h#L33

Given that, I believe what's left is to publish the key as the nick in
gns.  Here is what I'm thinking about for names.
_ircd._dht.<some hash of nick/chan>.<whatever domain would be appropriate>

If done this way I believe a single gns type can be used for all
hashcode records.  The nick and channel names in irc have few
restrictions, they can contain almost *any symbol.  If I'm
understanding the RFC correctly even 8bit chars are allowable.  Our
only saving grace is that they are **limited, per RFC, to a length of
9.

* https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459#section-2.2
** Some networks allow longer names.

Thanks!