After almost three years with the .coop registry, I’m moving on. It’s a bit of a wrench to leave such a great team but it is also time to move on. I’ll start as a developer for Co-operative Web in early January leaving me December to complete the first draft of the current book.

It’s been an interesting few days thanks to the rather large denial of service attack on the internet’s root servers. Although all thirteen servers were nominally hit, the attack had less effect on the net than the 9/11 attacks when anyone online simply swamped the net looking for a news feed. Which is encouraging.

What interested me more was the amount of information provided by the maintainers of those servers who fared better than others on how their root server works and how it coped. For those interested, have a look at http://www.isc.org/ops/f-root/ for details of just one and this presentation here for how it coped and what the attack looked like from its perspective. What encourages me is that only 3 of the 13 root servers are built like this, so attacks to bring down all the roots at the same time will need either a lot more brute force or several different styles to their attack depending on the structure of each root.

And if you’re still reading, share a smile on this rather more personal perspective on the attack from a new ICANN employee - On the inside, looking out at a tornado.

About time. For those unaware, RRP and EPP are the main protocols for registrars to talk to registries changing domain, contact and host details. EPP is replacing RRP. With the enforcement of EPP in .com, the main barrier to entry for new registrars has come down and pretty much all the main TLDs and most of the new ones too now all use EPP. One system to rule them all…

Registrars who support .com domain names will use the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) system by October 28. …There will be an additional step when trying to transfer a .com domain name among registrars. Specifically, a piece of information called an EPP code (aka auth code, EPP key, transfer secret) must be obtained from the current registrar and submitted to the gaining one prior to approving with the latter.

Source: Additional .COM Domain Name Transfer Requirement by October 28

ICANN has been releasing new top level domain names for the last five years. So why are they treated with such distrust from web and mail apps alike?

Case in point, last summer, several registrants of .coop domains got in touch saying that all of a sudden their emails were being rejected as spam. It turns out that the latest update for their spam filter included a rule stating that all email addresses ending in .coop were invalid and should therefore be classed as spam and not released to the net. Initial attempts to phone the makers of said spam filter were met by staff on their not-so-helpful-desk who confirmed that said rule was correct. Being the technical manager for the .coop TLD registry, that was a tad irksome, and the next update for that filter removed the rule with apologies from the vendor.

The thing is though, why did this happen at all? Surely internet application developers pay attention to this kind of thing? It’s not like there are so many new TLDs released that they can’t keep up or at the very least train their helpdesk staff appropriately so mistakes like this aren't made to begin with?

Is it a case of fear, uncertainty or doubt for anything newer than .com or.co.uk? Or just ill education? Take another example: the Co-operative bank in the UK still uses www.co-operativebank.co.uk as their main web address, which is fine. They also own www.co-operativebank.coop as well, but it's a dead end; it doesn't even redirect to the .co.uk site. Why? FUD? Judging by the fact it tells you that a .coop email address is invalid while you try and create an online account with them, maybe it’s doubt.

I’m ranting too much here, but my point remains. If you are writing applications that might be affected by the creation of new TLDs, try and add some flexibility into them. To take a case mentioned earlier, owners of .info, .aero, .name, .coop, .jobs, .museum, and .travel domains for instance would be greatly obliged if your email filter didn't dismiss those email addresses ending in a sequence of more than three letters by default. Likewise, all web administrators should know how to add a header for an alternate domain name to a site that already exists.

It seems ironic that in an environment that publicly continues to evolve, some are unwilling, uncertain or simply don’t know what to do when one of the foundations of that environment offers new opportunities. Too busy looking forward to see behind? I sense a job switch to 3+ letter TLD publicity guru ahead.

I’ve been off the net for a bit. Since last I wrote, a lot of things have been thrown up in the air and have yet to settle down to the ground while I’ve been working through my current project at work to move our live system to a new physical location. ‘Moving’ is a good description of everything at the moment. Change of course is a good thing, although everything at once take a little more patience \ causes a little more stress than even DNS alterations do. So the servers I manage are moving, the place where I work is moving so I’ll need to move the servers again after that, the place where Janey and I live will move, the place where Janey will work is moving, I have four or five different things I could do outside of work and need to pick a couple, another friend that is still nearby is moving out of Birmingham to Lincoln and very little seems stable. Where the pieces in the air are falling will define my life for the next few years or so. Here’s hoping they don’t get swallowed up in a snowstorm before they land.