The OpenNIC is a user owned and controlled Network Information Center offering a democratic, non-national, alternative to the traditional Top-Level Domain registries.

Users of the OpenNIC DNS servers, in addition to resolving host names in the Legacy U.S. Government DNS, can resolve host names in the OpenNIC operated namespaces as well as in the namespaces with which we have peering agreements (at this time those are AlterNIC and The Pacific Root).

Membership in the OpenNIC is open to every user of the Internet. All decisions are made either by a democratically elected administrator or through a direct ballot of the interested members and all decisions, regardless of how they are made, within OpenNIC are appealable to a vote of the general membership.

Sometime in the past 24 hours the OpenNIC list server inexplicably over-wrote the file containing the discussion list's subscriber addresses with a partial copy of majordomo's help message. We don't know yet whether this was a bug in majordomo (the list management software) or an exploit of some as-yet undiscovered security problem with it.

We've restored as much as we can, but anyone else who had been subscribed to that list will need to re-subscribe now. Instructions for this can be found on the lists page.

We have posted a notification to the discussion list about this; if you don't receive that notice then you're not among the addresses we could recover and will need to re-subscribe.

The member's forum site is down at the moment (and probably for a brief bit of the future) due to what looks like a software incompatibility between Perl 5.8.0 and something in the Scoop support modules.

The web site, databases and email system have now been moved to a new server (dedicated to OpenNIC functions). We apologize for any weirdness you may have experienced in the past few days during this move.

There's a nice intro article about OpenNIC at NewsFactor today.

The OpenNIC mail server is currently down for troubleshooting, as an errant email caused a set of loops bouncing error messages back into the discussion list. We hope to have this fixed soonest.

Support added for new ICANN TLDs.

It's been a long time without a news post. However, this was not for want of newsworthy activity. In a series of votes, it was decided that the OpenNIC should support five of the six newly active ICANN TLDS.

The votes are linked below:

• .info [alt]
• .museum [alt]
• .coop [alt]
• .aero [alt]
• .name [alt]

As per this vote [alt], we continue to support Atlantic Root's .biz. .pro is not yet active.

"committee" on root colaboration

OpenNIC member Brian Hartvigsen is volunteering to coordinate our relationships with the other root operators out there. (*rah!*) He will be writing a proposal for a mutual peering alliance between the various roots and coordinating the team of folks who have (and will) volunteer to function as amassadors to other roots. This team will be composed of (at least) 1 person per root and, while there are still some left, volunteers get to pick with which root they'll be our liason

There are a few parts of the proposal (and an old draft) posted to the Forum discussion.

OpenNIC search engine operational.

OpenNIC member Rhonda Hyslop has made available a search engine with many OpenNIC domains - and thousands of documents - indexed. This is a very useful resource. Her announcement is here [or here]. The search page can be found here [or here]. Please contact her if you have an OpenNIC domain which is not indexed. Her email is provided on the search page. Thanks, Rhonda, this is excellent.

OpenNIC FAQ v0.1 completed.

Dave Coyle has been hard at work and has completed the first public version of the OpenNIC FAQ. It can be found here [or here]. Please read it and forward any comments or suggestions directly to Dave [dave@qblock.com].

.indy vote completed.

By a 22-1 vote, the OpenNIC membership today approved the addition of a new TLD (.indy) to the OpenNIC root. The new TLD will be managed by Wes Mills and Michael Patrick. More details are available in the charter document itself. [also here]

Voting completed on ICAAN's .biz and .info TLDs.

The OpenNIC membership overwhelmingly (80%) voted to not include ICANN's .biz collider in our root. A somewhat smaller majority (55%) voted to peer ICANN's .info TLD. Thanks to everyone who voted.

The OpenNIC formed on Kuro5hin.org exactly one year ago today!

The article from which it grew was posted there on June 1, 2000. The K5 community provided the first admins and members of the OpenNIC and has continued to be quite open to and supportive of our ideals.

I want to thank them all for the initial response to that article, which inspired us to actually try it and for helping us grow (as in the K5 article asking for K5's input on planning for OpenNIC). The K5 community provided the inpetus and support for building OpenNIC.

I also want to thanks you all for participating in this. Isn't it nice that we get to have our birthday the day that the ccTLD operators pulling out of the ICANN DNSO makes the news? ;-)