This is the static page of OpenNIC News postings from 2000; as we're well out of that year, it's unlikely that any changes will be made to this page.

The Discussion list has decided to retire the TLD .opennic, which we have been using for internal naming, in favor of moving into a Second-Level Domain under a new TLD which will contain SLDs only for root name service groups. We have not yet decided on what this new TLD should be, though it's Charter is fairly well agreed, so we would like to ask for your suggestions here, as well as inform you that the domain for OpenNIC's material will be changing.

Before suggesting a name for the new TLD, please check Joe Baptista's database of TLDs in the various namespaces at http://www.pccf.net/cgi-bin/root-servers/whereis-tld and provide a description of any existing claims in your suggestion. This will help us avoid creating a new TLD which may cause conflict with another namespace.

If you are subscribed to the discussion list, then please post your suggestion directly to the list; if you are not, you are certainly welcome to email them to me and I'll forward them onto the list.

Thank you all for helping OpenNIC grow from simply an idea to a viable namespace with over 100 voting members in our first six months; and, depending on to what calendrical system you subscribe, possibly Happy New Year!

The membership database is up and accepting memberships. Memberships registered in the database will go in the OpenNIC incorporation documents as founding members. Go to the Joining OpenNIC to sign yourself up, particularly if you've been on the mailing lists for a while, since OpenNIC Handles will be numbered based on when you fill out the form, not when you subscribed to the mailing list. Sorry about that. ;-)

Our second candidate for the ICANN At-Large Board election is now posted on ICANN's site! This is Cameron Gray, who works at UltraSpeed UK (so he's obviously up for the Europe slot). We'll be working out the shared platform, so more news on that soon.

OpenNIC's first candidate for the ICANN At-Large Board election is now posted on ICANN's site! We will be putting forth candidates in as many regions as possible, so email Robin if you'd like to be the OpenNIC candidate in your region. And let's get the campaign going.

Robin will be at LinuxWorld handing out flyers and buttons for the election, so if you're interested, see his candidacy page.

We're getting some interest from the non-sysadmin crowd now or, more accurately, from sysadmins who don't run their own mail servers, so we've decided to open the Discussion List to folks who cannot receive mail sent from an OpenNIC address. So if you were on the announcements list before because of this policy, you can now switch your subscription to the discussion list so you get to vote and everything.

We are now replacing the ICANN NS pointers in the root zone file with pointers to our own Tier 0 and 1 servers. This should help speed up distributing new root updates to Tier 1. The current serial number (first after this change to the script) is "2000080101", so check your servers sometime today to see if the update propagated correctly.

Since there were no objections, we have added NS pointers to the AlterNIC roots for the 9 AlterNIC domains to our tld-root distribution. We seem to have a few servers which are not loading the root updates properly so. if you run one, check your server in the morning to make sure the serial on the file is at least "2000072802", which is current.

We have found two clashes in these nine to TLDs claimed by others. To our knowledge, the AlterNIC claims should be the earliest and, if they are actively serving, that would give them obvious primacy for each. Out of fairness, however, we have added the following text to the AlterNIC entry on the Alternate Registries page until we can get better information on the situation:

The one quirk in respecting these 9 TLDs, it seems, is that there are other conflicting historical claims to some of the same names. OpenNIC, regardless, will not impose on these domains with our own, though in the course of arranging the peering agreement we may be forced to decide on the legitimacy of these claims. Until we finish our survey of the alternate namespaces or are convinced of a better claim during that survey, however, we will peer these nine entire from AlterNIC. Users of OpenNIC's DNS servers can therefore resolve domains in these TLDs as served by AlterNIC.

We've been having a bit of trouble using named-xfer to get the root zone data from f.root-servers.net, the ISC root server. Considering that all the other root servers reject zone transfers for the root, thus making it likely that we were exploiting a misconfiguration on the ISC server, we have decided it will be more stable to fetch the data directly from NSI's FTP server. The script now uses wget, from The Free Software Foundation to download their file for merging with the OpenNIC data.

We have also made a few changes to the Tier use policies. Tier 0 and 1 are no longer to be used by end users for general DNS queries, since it prevents their nearest server from caching the query data and bypasses the tiered structure which we've put up to distribute the server load. Since we are now up to three Tier 2 servers, listed on the Public Name Servers page, this should not be a burden.

The new web site is under way here at www.opennic.glue (that would be www.opennic.unrated.net for those of you not using OpenDNS). Please update any links you have to point people to this server, by whichever name is appropriate in context. If you'd like to contribute to the new site, send an email to the webmaster address.

The Tier 0 server's download of the ICANN zone data and merging of our data into it to keep our servers current is now automated. The script has a minimal check for our TLDs in the ICANN data which will trigger a fail and notify root if it finds them, but it could be improved. The script and its support files are linked off the Using OpenDNS on a Server page if you'd care to read them. If you have any improvements (or just suggestions for improvements) to this script you should contact Robin.

The OpenDNS design is now running in what will be its long term form. The system should be significantly more scalable now than it has bewen in its development forms. If you haven't seen the details yet, you should probably look in on the appropriate Using OpenDNS page to see if your configuration is still good.

We are now serving .parody, and the list has received a proposal to add .bbs.

OpenNIC is now serving .oss, a domain exclusively for Open Source Software projects, and we have a volunteer to assemble the administrative teams for .geek and .groovy.