############################################# TSDNS ############################################# TS DNS is a system that allows TeamSpeak users to connect to servers that are running on arbitrary ports without having to specify the port. The "TSDNS name" is used by the system to determine IP and Port. It can be compared to some extent to the "Virtual Host" system of Apache in its purpose, though the technical aspects are very much different. Motivation ---------- Say you own a server running on the IP 1.2.3.4 and Port 4321. Telling people you want to join your server to join "1.2.3.4:4321" or (using regular DNS) "myclanrocks.net:4321" works, but the port there is an extra source of confusion to inexperienced users. It would be nice if you could just tell people to join "myclanrocks.net" (as if your TS server were running on the default port). How it works ------------ A TSDNS server is a very simple network service that uses TCP/IP to listen on port 41144 (default) and knows a list of (query,result) pairs. Upon connecting to the TSDNS server you must submit your query and the TSDNS server will answer you with the result, if it has this query in his list, or with "404" if no such query is known to it. The result is supposed to be either an IP (which assumes a port of 9987) or an IP:Port pair. Instead of a number as port the special string "$PORT" is also allowed, which results in any port specified on the client side to be used. Whenever a TeamSpeak Client tries to connect to a server using a hostname, it will try to connect the TSDNS servers to try and retrieve a (IP, Port) pair using the hostname as string that the TSDNS server is queried with. Since client 3.1 the client will only query a _tsdns._tcp srv record for the 2nd level of the domain. Illustration: hostname=voice.teamspeak.com TSDNS Server queried: _tsdns._tcp.teamspeak.com (with query = voice.teamspeak.com) Second Example (with longer hostname) hostname=i.will.roxx.your.soxs.myclan.com TSDNS Server queried: _tsdns._tcp.myclan.com (with query = i.will.roxx.your.soxs.myclan.com) If any of these succeed to retrieve an answer from a TSDNS server the one to answer first is used to connect. If all of the above TSDNS server queries fail (usually due to no TSDNS servers running on the (up to) four hosts), the TeamSpeak Client will fall back to a regular DNS resolve of the hostname. DIRECT SRV Records ------------------ With Client 3.0.8 and higher, the TS3 Client supports looking up so called SRV records in addition to the regular hostname resolves that it continues to do just as before. Adding SRV records directly in your name server configuration can act as a replacement for the TSDNS service, you could add a SRV record like this: "_ts3._udp.myclanrocks.net. 86400 IN SRV 10 5 4321 myclanrocks.net." This would also solve the scenario presented above, it would allow people to join your TS3 server running on the non-standard port of "4321" to connect by simply entering "myclanrocks.net" as server address. The question arises what the order of precedence is with these various resolve methods: #1 _ts3 SRV record #2 _tsdns SRV record #3 DNS Note that since client 3.0.20 both SRV records for _ts3 and _tsdns support full priority and weight rules. That is to say, you can specify multiple ip addresses for backup and redundancy, which the client will respect.