bitcoin maintains a database of P2P addresses. Obtaining addresses via netstat is rather sub-optimal, when you could use
bitcointools to extract addresses directly from the bitcoin database.
As to the larger point...
HTTP and DNS bootstrapping should be pursued. Much more efficient than IRC.
Right, that's why I was pursuing on that way.
By the way, I made a test with bitcointools to dump the address out of the database :
python2.7 dbdump.py --datadir ~/.bitcoin/ --address
...155.6:36128 (lastseen: Sat Dec 18 21:09:42 2010)
68.52.60.203:36128 (lastseen: Sun Dec 26 15:28:48 2010)
68.53.17.115:36128 (lastseen: Thu Dec 16 18:56:57 2010)
68.56.241.235:36128 (lastseen: Sun Dec 26 17:32:34 2010)
68.62.250.145:36128 (lastseen: Sun Dec 26 15:39:33 2010)
....
Even if the netstat approach could be suboptimal, there is an advantage over relying on the addr dump
from the database. If you get the address from the TCP Established session, these are really the active Bitcoin clients
and from the database, you are guessing out of the lastseen information where you have already a lot of dead
addresses. And picking the appropriate time delta can be tricky except if there is already something in the database
structure to just list the active ones. On the other hand, the Berkeley database need to be only accessed by one
process at a time and you need to shutdown the existing the current database.
Maybe another appropriate way might be to read the addr message passing over the TCP sessions (using pcap) and
extract the addresses and publish that stream to the HTTP/DNS directory.
What's the most appropriate techniques to get the currently active Bitcoin addresses?