Until a DNS proxy that uses namecoin comes along, one approach to using namecoin for host name lookups could be to provide the option to scan the names every time a block is mined and update/rewrite the users /etc/hosts (or windows equivalent). This might be a quick way of starting to use the namecoin chain for lookups. Even a simple script that does this every 10 minutes or so, getting the names from namecoind via RPC would do a reasonable job.
An option for using socks enabled programs is to use ncproxy combined with SSH. SSH to localhost using the '-D' option to set up a socks proxy. Code:
$ ssh -Dn 2001 user@locahost &
$ ncproxy --user=namecoind-user --password=namecoind-password -p 9055 -s 127.0.0.1:2001
This sets up ncproxy to forward to the SSH proxy. You can configure firefox to use this socks proxy by going into 'Preferences/Advanced/Network/Settings' and adding '127.0.0.1' and '9055' in the Socks proxy area. You should also go into 'about:config' in Firefox, search for net.proxy.socks_remote_dns and double click on it to set it to true. This will cause DNS requests to go through ncproxy and then the SSH socks proxy.
You can also slip polipo in there if you want a web cache. Run:
Code:
$ ssh -Dn 2001 user@locahost &
$ ncproxy --user=namecoind-user --password=namecoind-password -p 9055 -s 127.0.0.1:2001
$ ./polipo socksParentProxy=localhost:9055
Configure firefox to use the HTTP proxy on port 9055 instead of a socks proxy.
These approaches seem to work in that name lookups occur. Unfortunately there appear to be no namecoin entries with the JSON format to actually see if ncproxy is doing the job.
Before vinced's post, I was thinking more like having different Json objects for forwarding (IN), zone (IN) and each non-IP service.