Software
www.skarnet.org

skadns

• How to install skadns
• Upgrading from previous versions of skadns

What is it ?

Skadns is Kind of an Asynchronous DNS client software.

• Kind of: it's small. Really small. But it just works.
• Asynchronous: all DNS operations are non-blocking.
• DNS client software: it's a DNS client, what you may know as a "stub resolver". To perform full DNS resolution, you will still need a full resolver like dnscache.

The skadns library offers a simple API to make asynchronous DNS queries.
The skadnsip, skadnsmx and skadnsfilter commands are examples of how to use that API. They are mainly there for their source code.
The skadnsd daemon, usable as a child process or as a separate service, handles the grunt work of DNS querying and makes the network completely invisible to the client.

Reference

Commands

• The skadnsip program
• The skadnsmx program
• The skadnsfilter program

Libraries

• The skadnsd program
• The skadns library interface

Similar work

• ares is an asynchronous DNS resolver library with a nice interface and more configuration options than skadns (and a very reasonable size). Use it if you find that skadns lacks configurability (you shouldn't need more than it provides, but well, you're the user). Yet it doesn't hide the DNS internals as opaquely as skadns does, giving you a bunch of fds to select() on instead of just one.
• adns works fine, and is small for a GNU project. Impressive. But the interface is still too complex and much too generic - the usual problems with GNU software.

Related resources

• skadns is discussed on the skaware mailing-list.
• skadns has a freshmeat page.