By Nick Patience
Network Solutions Inc’s senior VP engineering Dave Holtzman, who heads up the operation and administration of the company’s domain name registration system, says that it is understandable none of the testbed domain name registrars has got its system up and running yet, because two weeks is not enough to implement such a system from the ground up. NSI has supplied its shared registration system (SRS) to all five registrars, who have all paid the necessary fees and bonds.
Holtzman says it’s not bugs with the software libraries that comprise the SRS, but the security layer that is probably holding up the implementation. Each session established between the registrars and NSI requires encryption through a two-way SSL server, which sits on top of the shared registration system (SRS) libraries. NSI suggested packages the registrars could buy or they could implement the SSL themselves, he says. Holtzman did not want to divulge further details for fear of giving hackers too much information, wary that a hack into the domain name system’s database could be catastrophic.
It seems that America Online Inc and the Council of Registrars are behind the other three testbed registrars: Register.com, France Telecom SA and Melbourne IT. It looks as if the test period will be at least half-way through its 60-day duration before the first of the registrars starts registering domain names straight into the NSI domain database. Holtzman feels that 60-day test period is just too short a time frame in which to smooth out problems with implementing the SRS, and to get a competitive registration market up and running.
A further meeting of the SRS technical advisory committee is scheduled for May 26-27, but as that clashes with the next meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), it may have to be moved, depending on how many of the group of around ten people can make it.
