Development Update — April 30

Skywire: DHT Address Mirror + Self-Publish

PR #2399 adds two pieces that close the loop on what visors can do over the DHT directly, without dmsg-discovery as a write path.

Self-publish — every visor now mirrors its own DMSG entry into the DHT on the same cadence the dmsg-discovery sees in HTTP. The DHT target is SHA256(visorPK || “client”), the value is the full signed dmsg entry. A peer that wants to dial a visor can look up the entry from the DHT just like it would from dmsg-discovery — same shape, same signature verification.

Address mirror — the resolver layer (.dmsg/.skynet hostname resolution) now consults the DHT in addition to dmsg-discovery. If the DHT has a fresher entry — which it often does, since the visor self-publishes on every transport change rather than waiting for the dmsg-discovery TTL refresh — the resolver uses the DHT value.

The combined effect: a visor’s discovery surface is reachable through three independent paths now (HTTP dmsg-discovery, DHT via dmsg-discovery’s mirror, DHT via the visor’s self-publish). Production services remain the source of truth, but a partitioned visor that can’t reach dmsg-discovery can still answer dial attempts from the DHT.

Skywire: DHT Spec + CLI

2398 dht: spec audit, comparison doc, peers/reconcile/source CLI — three deliverables in one PR:

• Spec audit — docs/dht.md reconciles what the implementation does against the Kademlia paper, calls out the deviations (recursive vs iterative lookup, our value-size cap, the salt convention), and flags TODO items for the next pass.
• Comparison doc — docs/discovery-comparison.md lays out HTTP-discovery, DHT-mirror, and CXO-feed side by side, with a “which read path wins for what query” table. Useful for new contributors trying to understand why we have three discovery layers.
• CLI — skywire cli dht peers lists known DHT peers with distance metric, dht reconcile triggers a manual re-mirror pass (the operator escape hatch when DHT and HTTP diverge), dht source <key> reports which writer last published a given target (debugging signature collisions).

Skywire: SUDPH Nil-Guard

2400 fix(sudph): nil-guard Dial when listen() failed — if the SUDPH listener failed to bind at startup (port already in use, permission denied), subsequent Dial calls would nil-deref on the listener reference. The fix returns a typed error instead, and the autoconnect manager skips SUDPH for the remainder of the process lifetime once the listener is known-dead. The visor still serves stcpr/dmsg in that state.

Also bundled: a lint sweep that had been accumulating on develop. The --strict go vet check is back to clean.

Skywire: Misc

• The lint sweep clears about a dozen newly-flagged staticcheck items that had built up alongside the DHT and skychat-pairing PRs over the last two weeks.
• Routine doc touch-ups on the resolver auto-chain example to use the new serve command instead of the retired skynet port.