French characters in bind zone

[Sebastian E. Castro Avila]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2006 19:05:55 -0300, Werner Schalk <werner_schalk at gmx.de>  
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a customer who wants me to register a domain name containing  
> french
> special characters (e.g. dcorè.net). How do I create a zone file for  
> such a
> domain? I created a sample one (which I always use and which always  
> works)
> but for these french special characters the zone doesn't work (bind  
> simply
> ignores it). Any ideas on how to implement a zone file for such a domain?
>

You need IDNA (Internationalized Domain Names for Applications)

Due to restrictions in DNS protocols, the labels are constrained to  
contain only LDH (Letter-Digit-Hyphen).
To overcome that, you must convert the zone name using special characters  
to ACE encoding.

For example, dcorè.net turns into xn--dcor-8oa.net in ACE encoding.

So you configure in your nameserver a zone for "xn-dcor-8oa.net". Any  
IDN-compliant application will encode the name with special characters  
into ACE and then, send any query.

If you want to give it a try, visit this

http://www.ñandú.cl or http://www.xn--and-6ma2c.cl  you'll get the same!

By the time being, Safari/Mozilla/Firefox/Opera are IDN-compliant  
browsers. It was expected that IE7 to support IDN, but I haven't tested it.


Kind Regards,

> Thank you.
>
> Kind regards,
> Werner.
>
>



-- 
Sebastian E. Castro Avila             sebastian at nic.cl
Administrador de DNS, NIC Chile

Miraflores 222, Piso 14
Santiago, Chile Cod. Postal 832-0198
Phone: +56-2-9407705                  Fax  : +56-2-9407701