The OpenNIC "Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions."
Terry Pratchett, The Truth
This is an old OpenNIC webpage! Please visit the wiki ([alt]) for up-to-date information about OpenNIC.
About OpenNIC
· News Archive
· Organization
· Policies
· Mailing Lists
· How You Can Help
· Contact
· FAQ [alt]
Using OpenDNS
· on Name Servers
· on Personal Computers
· Top-Level Domains
· Public Name Servers
Resources & Links
· Other Namespaces
· DNS Information
· OpenNIC root zone
· OpenNIC CA certificate
·
Search Engine [alt]
· Web Directory
Membership
· Joining OpenNIC
· Registering a Domain
· Members' Forum
· Creating New TLDs
In General

The OpenNIC is a young project and has some difficult challenges to deal with to establish itself. Most of the real technical issues have been dealt with, but new ones will always crop up; it seems to be in the nature of computers and networking. The most important issues, however, are social. The established DNS system and the corporations who control are very large and very rich and are, in general, not fond of the idea that the users should own the DNS system; they are simply making too much money from it.

If you are interested in keeping up with the project's growth and status, you should at least join the OpenNIC announcements list or, if you are interested in helping decide how the OpenNIC should be run, join the discussion list. Instructions for how to subscribe to either list are on the Mailing Lists page.

As a User:

The first thing to do is to contact the administrator of the server for which you are configured to resolve DNS. This will generally be either the tech support group at your ISP or the IT/Support group at your office or company. By only resolving the Legacy TLDs, they are restricting your ability to see a growing part of the general Internet.

If your ISP or IT support folks are not interested in supporting OpenDNS as a network-wide facility on their network you can still resolve OpenDNS names by configuring your personal computer to use a server that does.

As an Administrator

Obviously, the first step is to set your server to use OpenDNS. In addition, however, you could also open access to resolve on your server as a Tier 2 public name server for the OpenNIC. This will help distribute the load on general name resolution.

To get involved in maintaining the OpenNIC itself, you could also volunteer to organize a new TLD within OpenNIC and arrange service for it.

As a Programmer

We are developing a set of utilities and applications both for automating the OpenNIC itself and to help users and administrators switch their machines to OpenDNS. In the long run, the suggestion has been raised that we should begin work on new name resoltion protocols and software for the existing protocols. If you are interested in working on these projects, please join the discussion list and let us know.

All material on this site, and in the OpenNIC databases, is held as copyrighted by the users of the OpenDNS system and is managed jointly by the Maintainers of the OpenNIC. Please contact the OpenNIC webmaster for any further information about this site or its content. Thank you.
last modified 2001-04-01