Good to know. Sounds like it's mostly a question of style then, though multiple A records would require no new coding whereas bitmasks would.
Using the DNSBL
Anyone can query our DNSBL through normal DNS means. Just reverse the octets and do a name lookup. For example, to check if 127.0.0.2 is present in opm.blitzed.org, do a DNS lookup on 2.0.0.127.opm.blitzed.org. Each entry in the DNSBL has an A record and a TXT record associated with it, the TXT record contains a URL to the proxy information page specific to that IP address telling the user a little information about how to sort out the proxy.
In opm.blitzed.org, the A record has an IP address of 127.1.0.x where x is a bitmask of the types of proxy that have been reported to be running on the host. The values of the bitmask are as follows:
WinGate 1 SOCKS 2 HTTP CONNECT 4 Router 8 HTTP POST 16
The bitmask approach is more compact, but the multiple A record approach is more human-readable and transparent IMO. I'm leaning towards the latter, but am interested in any other comments.
Jeff C.
This is all quite interesting. I'm happy with either method obviously. Excuse my ignorance with regards to DNS lookups, but do all the A records come down with the first DNS lookup, or are they fetched each time from the remote server? What are the traffic overheads with incorporating either type of method - I would have thought that the bit mask method would cause less traffic - also with smaller zone transfers?
Cheers Scott