[Discussion] DNS Seed Nodes Maintenance and Centralization

[ohchase]

Briefly, in order to run a Monerod daemon and successfully communicate with the network there is an initial effort to search for additional Monerod daemon p2p instances to communicate with.

The default behavior when running over Clearnet on the mainnet chain is to first consider the DNS Seed Nodes [0] .
When considering DNS Seed Nodes, if m_enable_dns_seed_nodes is set to false, the entire DNS Seed Node mechanism will be skipped in favor of the IP based seed node mechanism [1]. m_enable_dns_seed_nodes is set to true by default though [2].
There is 4 DNS seed nodes hard coded as of now found in [3].

    const std::vector<std::string> m_seed_nodes_list =
    { "seeds.moneroseeds.se"
    , "seeds.moneroseeds.ae.org"
    , "seeds.moneroseeds.ch"
    , "seeds.moneroseeds.li"
    };

From a historical stackexchange communication it seems that @fluffypony is in control of all of these seed nodes [4].

All of these seed nodes do not seem to be operational.

dig seeds.moneroseeds.se

; <<>> DiG 9.18.28 <<>> seeds.moneroseeds.se
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 12086
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;seeds.moneroseeds.se.		IN	A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
moneroseeds.se.		10694	IN	SOA	a.dns.gandi.net. hostmaster.gandi.net. 1560022071 10800 3600 604800 10800

;; Query time: 27 msec
;; SERVER: 10.96.0.1#53(10.96.0.1) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Sat Jan 11 13:35:30 EST 2025
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 111

The community should consider either

1. Removing DNS Seed Node Mechanism in Full
2. Decentralizing the owners of seed nodes

My largest concern with this situation is, if someone was to squat one of the domains they could immediately begin feeding Monerod nodes with their own selection of curated possibly nefarious nodes.

citations/sources
[0]

monero/src/p2p/net_node.inl

Line 860 in 2e8a128

std::set<std::string> node_server<t_payload_net_handler>::get_seed_nodes(epee::net_utils::zone zone)

[1]

monero/src/p2p/net_node.inl

Line 759 in 2e8a128

if (!m_enable_dns_seed_nodes)

[2]

monero/src/p2p/net_node.h

Line 257 in 2e8a128

m_enable_dns_seed_nodes(true),

[3]

monero/src/p2p/net_node.h

Line 301 in 2e8a128

const std::vector<std::string> m_seed_nodes_list =

[4] https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/11128/how-does-monero-use-dns-to-discover-seed-nodes