Fw: bind international

Jim Reid jim at rfc1035.com
Wed Apr 10 12:34:49 UTC 2002


>>>>> "manuel" == =?iso-8859-1?Q?Manuel Rodr=EDguez Salgado?= <iso-8859-1> writes:

    >> I want know a bind version wich resolv: ñ á, ...

The short answer is none. The DNS protocol is 8-bit clean, so domain
names can contain any characters. BIND follows the DNS protocol so it
can cope with non-ASCII characters in domain names. However other
protocols place restrictions on the characters that can be used for a
host name or an email address. This pretty much means that host names
can only be made from the ASCII characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and hyphen
(-). Host names which use other characters are illegal and may break
other software. For example mail programs might behave unpredictably
if they're presented with an email address containing illegal
characters such as the ones you typed above. 

The IETF are working on Internationlised Domain Names (IDN). The idea
is to provide an encoding of non-ASCII characters into strings that
are valid hostnames and back again. This work is not yet complete. An
IDN toolkit is in the contributed software for BIND9 and maybe for
BIND8 too. This would be helpful in finding out about IDN but may be
premature for deploying on production systems.


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