[Pdns-users] Re: IDN Support?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 09:39:43AM +0100,
 Viktor Steinmann <viktor.steinmann at ch.easynet.net> wrote 
 a message of 22 lines which said:

> I'm planning to set up PowerDNS as a replacement of BIND. But since
> we need to support International Domain Names starting in March,

Good! Congratulations to the swiss NIC.

> I checked the mail-archives and the documentation, but didn't find
> anything about this issue (if there if something which I overlookes,
> I'm sorry)...

Funny, there was a thread on the BIND mailing list one week ago about
the same subject. I will give the same reply: the official standard
for IDN (RFC 3490) is IDNA, with A being Applications. Which means
that all the work has to be done in the applications (or, more
reasonably, in the libraries), not in the name server.

To summary:

Short answer: Just serve ACE strings (xn--caf-dma.ch), you do not need
anything special in PowerDNS.

Long answer: In your information system, you should probably store the
Unicode strings. Translate them to ACE either:
  * in the zone file generator,
  * or when adding them in the DBMS, in a different column (name and
  acename, for instance). This is specially interesting if you use a
  DBMS backend. A stored procedure is convenient for that.