international domains

[neorder]

i just read the most recent feature updates and DA now support international domains.

what does this international domains mean? i tried to setup a domain in other language (chinese in this case), it doesn't work, DA says invalid domain?

[DirectAdmin Support]

Hello,

What characters are you using? I had to tiptoe around a few characters, so it's possible that some where left out.

This is the range added for characters.. It's possible your's isn't in that set. Let me know and I'll make the required changes.

161<=ch && ch<=255

John

John

[neorder]

GB2312, i tried one, but DA says domain invalid.

thanks

[DirectAdmin Support]

Hello,

Is that a character? (I'm not farmiliar with the chinese characters)

I'm looking for a number from 0-255 (www.asciitable.com). If chinese characters are written out with several normal ascii characters, then that would really complicate things :)

John

[neorder]

oops, i was referring encoding ;)

what kinda of information do you need to know about it? i will find out for you.

i think this is gona make DA really special, i have yet to see any control panel that support chinese character domains!

[DirectAdmin Support]

Well, I think I'd need to first learn how they work! :) If each character is saved with 1 ascii character, or if you need multiple ascii characters per chinese character. (255 ascii characters may not be enough to encode how many thousand chinese charcater?;)). Basically, I need to get a grasp of what would need to be changed by learning how the encoding works. (sample webpage perhaps)

John

[nobaloney]

Originally posted by DirectAdmin Support
Well, I think I'd need to first learn how they work! :)
Here's a link to the RFC, John:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1922.txt

I just typed "encoding chinese characters" (without the quotes) into Google. and clicked on "I'm Feeling Lucky".

:)

Jeff

[synflex]

Well depending on which standards you want to support, currently there's still a few choices out there.

One major international domain name provider does a conversion on multilingual domain names to form ascii compatible domain name, eg.

[SOME-INTERNATIONALISE-DOMAIN].[INTERNATIONALISE-TLD] get converted to 1A2B3C4D5E.0Z9Y8X (Pardon the substitution for readability sake.) It works for even right to left encoding.

While another major provider does internationalise domain resolving thru UTF8 encoding/encapsulation.

In both situation, the providers hosted a series of substituted root domain name servers to hijack queries to either UTF encoded internationalise TLD, or the converted (UTF5 similiar) TLDs.

It further complicates when individual country TLDs supports a different provider, some even go all the way to resolv their own version of UTF-8 TLDs (as such IE compatible).

Either way, it's not that difficult to enable support for international domain names.

- Use default encoding of utf-8 for web interface.
- Include 3 or more different sets of ROOT_SERVERS, while performing domain name sanity check, runs it thru all ROOT_SERVERS and use the set that gives a reply, or by running it thru each individual whois, or even allow user to define their own international domain name providers.
- disable e-mail address sanity check.

I'm not exactly very sure on how your data structure works, but the above way should work on most generic machines and languages.

Murf.