neue internet

The IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) operates and maintains a number of key aspects of the DNS, including the root zone, and the .int and .arpa domains.

In addition to that, they maintain a list of all the current TLDs available on the DNS. Having such a list handy is useful for anyone who wishes to build tools for the internet, and low‑friction data availability is the best way to empower builders.

With that in mind, we wanted to emulate this good practice with a list of Handshake TLDs we manage at Neuenet.

Let’s take a look at the script that automatically creates our list every night:

#!/bin/zsh

DIRECTORY=/var/custom-certs/tld/
OUTPUT=/var/www/data/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

print -l ${DIRECTORY}*(/:u:t) > ${OUTPUT}
{ printf "# Version $(date +%Y.%m.%d), Last Updated $(date -u)\n"; cat ${OUTPUT}; } > tmp.txt
mv tmp.txt ${OUTPUT}

# allow the world to view file
chmod -R 744 ${OUTPUT}

At a high‑level, we use zsh scripting to look inside a directory on our server and print the name of every subdirectory to a text file.

In the /tld directory, there are subdirectories for every one of our 900+ TLDs and within those there are .crt and .key files. Yes, we made websites for every TLD (writeup and tool for doing this yourself, coming soon). Anyhoo, no need for a database because we have the information we need in the filesystem!

To standardize things, every TLD directory is in ASCII/punycode and set to full uppercase as it’s getting added to a temporary file. For a little extra flavor, the file is prepended with the current date in ChronVer/ISO 8601 format, along with UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

Finally, the temporary file is moved to its final resting place and proper permissions are set so you, dear reader, can freely view this link (representative output, below).

# Version 2022.05.04, Last Updated Wed May  4 07:00:02 UTC 2022
0451
07D0EB
0X01
0XA0
2077
247366
24HRS
2OO
50P
5OO
ABILAO
ACAPELLA
ACAPPELLA
ACCENTUATES
ADAMJENSEN
ADBLOCKERS
ADULTS
ADZA
AFROBEAT
…you get the idea

We tell cron to run this script every night at midnight. If a new folder of certs is added it’ll get picked up by the script, and that’s one less thing we have to worry about!

To do all this yourself, you’ll need to install zsh (and optionally, Oh My Zsh). Also, update DIRECTORY and OUTPUT to match the values you want.

This tutorial is helpful for getting started with cron in general, but here’s the commands you need to know right now:

• crontab -l lists the current user’s cron jobs
• crontab -e allows you to edit the current user’s cron jobs

Once you’re in edit mode:

0 0 * * * ./process_extensions.sh

Replace ./process_extensions.sh with the path and filename of your script. For our example, we are logged in as root and the process_extensions.sh script is at the base of our user folder.

You can view our list of Handshake TLDs at https://data.neuenet/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt.