Topic: Virtual Domains with special Characters

[Morten U. Hansen]

I have registered the domain 'dintandlæge.nu'. This domain name was sold in Denmark and employ the Danish special character 'æ'.

How do I point DNS forwarding to this Virtual Domain in SME-Server? When it uses the char 'æ'?

Is there a way to do this.

Thanks for any thoughts on this

Morten

PS: and yes I am aware that it cannot be reached from the rest of the World due to the letter not existing on std. keyboards. This is not crucial as it is a Dentalclinic operating only on local patients.

[Robert]

That's IDN, isn't it? Both Slashdot and The Register have recent articles on this. The Slashdot article points to a short tech note at http://www.switch.ch/id/idn/tech.html. Your registrar should be able to provide assistance.

[Morten U. Hansen]

My Domain broker, informed me that you can replace the Danish way of spelling with something called 'Punicode', which in effect approximates the special chars with a HEX code. I.e. my domain 'dintandlæge.nu' translates to 'xn--dintanlge-k6a.nu' on the SME-server.

Cool!

Thought you'd like to know.        =0)

Morten

[Robert]

That's what's explained in the switch.ch article I mentioned. Good to hear your domain broker was able to help you. From what I understand, not all of them are as helpful.

[Robert]

BTW, you forgot a 'd' in the DNS name. It's xn--dintandlge-k6a.nu. Thought I'd correct it for the benefit of international-keyboard-challenged people looking for a dentist in Denmark

[Morten U. Hansen]

Thanks Robert,

Do you know where I might find a tool or rule that can help me translate these domainnames into punycode?

M

[Morten U. Hansen]

And do you know whether MS IE supports this new functionality yet.

On this demo page I get errors in all the URLs When I click them... Can't be right?

http://www.nunames.nu/eu-lang-test.htm

I get following error:   ************

ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.özz.nu:80/

The following error was encountered:

Invalid URL
Some aspect of the requested URL is incorrect. Possible problems:

Missing or incorrect access protocol (should be http://'' or similar)
Missing hostname
Illegal double-escape in the URL-Path
Illegal character in hostname; underscores are not allowed
***************''

What gives?

M

[Robert]

There's a GNU IDN library project called libidn at http://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/. The homepage has a link to an online web interface at http://josefsson.org/idn.php. The libidn homepage is probably also a good place to find more technical background. BTW, I know nothing about IDN. I just read your question and remembered I'd read Slashdot and El Reg articles about this thing called IDN and thought it might be of interest.