Re: Shared TLD's? Dead Idea. (Re: newdom BOF)

[Aveek Datta <MoNoLiTH+@CMU.EDU>]

Excerpts from newdom: 20-Nov-96 Re: Shared TLD's? Dead Idea.. by Pierre
Beyssac@fasterix. 
> This is exactly what EU.org runs on: Apache, FreeBSD for the basic
> stuff plus a few Perl scripts calling "dig" to check nameservers.
> HTTP authentication for request processing by the administrators. The
> whois database uses the publicly available and very good RIPE
> database (Perl) scripts. Not a single byte of commercial software
> runs on that machine.

My two cents on what ML.ORG uses:
  * Perl scripts of which I wrote from scratch, with the possible
    exception that I derived my decode-cgi script from other publicly
    available scripts
  * It uses a shell script which in turn calls DIG to do a lookup
    of the secondary nameservers for subdomain registrations

On my server, *ALL* requests are immediately accepted assuming they
pass all the checks. We also accept Machine Registrations for those
people who can not set up DNS for themselves for technical or administrative
reasons. We also provide free Web forwarding services.. but I digress. The
bottom line is the same: it took me a total of probably less than a day's
work to write all the scripts. This includes ALL the versions of the script
--> and the Free Domain script is in version 7.0

> Enough said for technical details; the bottom line is that I plan
> to release my code as freeware, if anyone is interested, as a
> demonstration that running a NIC is technically a solved problem,
> and as a way to promote the establishing of small NICs.

I've seen a portions of his code and they seem to be very professionaly done
and usable for other registries. My code in the other word works well but is
still unusable for distribution. This might change in the future, but any
geek with an idea, a Perl reference manual, and friends with a server can
setup a small NIC. No, I'm not talking about running .COM. I'm talking about
running a medium sized domain registry service.


 Aveek Datta           _ _ _   _                Email: aveek@andrew.cmu.edu
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