North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Enable BIND cache server to resolve chinese domain name?

  • From: Steve Gibbard
  • Date: Mon Jul 04 01:27:47 2005 
On Mon, 4 Jul 2005, Mark Andrews wrote:


Some of our customer complaint they could not visit
back to their web site, which use chinese domain name.
I google the net and found some one recommend to use
public-root.com servers in hint file.

I found domain name like xn--8pru44h.xn--55qx5d could
not be resolved either.

Our cache server runs BIND9.3.1 with root server list
from rs.internic.net.

Do I need to modify our cache server configuration to
enable it?

	Only if you wish to do all your other customers a disfavour
	by configuring your caching servers to support a private
	namespace then yes.
There's no particular technical magic to the ICANN-run roots, except that it's what just about everybody else is using. This means that if you enter the same hostname on two computers far away from each other, you're probably going to end up at the same place, or at least at places run by the same organization. This standardization is valuable, so anybody trying to make a different standard that isn't widely used compete with it is going to have a hard time convincing people to switch.

That doesn't mean a competing system wouldn't work, for those who are using it. They'd just be limited in who they could talk to, and that generally wouldn't be very appealing.

That said, a big country implementing a new DNS root on a national scale may not have that problem. The telecom world is already full of systems that don't cross national borders. In the US case, think of all the cell phones that have international dialing turned off by default, and all the 800 numbers whose owners probably aren't at all bothered by their inability to receive calls from other countries.

A system that would limit my ability to talk to people in other countries doesn't sound very appealing to me. On the other hand, the Chinese government has been trying hard to limit or control communications between people in China and the rest of the world for years. In that sense, maintaining their own DNS root, incompatible with the rest of the world, might be seen as a considerable advantage. If they don't care about breaking compatibility with the DNS root the rest of the world uses, the disadvantages of such a scheme become fairly moot.

-Steve