SIDN’s Dutch Numerical Domain Landrush succums to its Success
Dutch Registrar SIDN’s numerical .nl domain name landrush succumbed to its own success on Thursday when their mail server just couldn’t manage the sudden explosion of landrush applications. As reported earlier, at 12.00pm on Thursday, the numeric .nl domain landrush was given the green light by Dutch Domain Registry SIDN. Everyone who wanted a numerical domain was allowed, by means of a registrar, to request their domain via e-mail.
According to a recent communique, SIDN indicated that, ‘ In order to prevent our incoming e-mail system from overloading, we have taken a number of precautions’.
At 12.00pm sharp, 10,000 new e-mail requests started flooding SIDN’s mail server every second and it turned out to be too much of a good thing. SIDN was ill prepared and the anticipated mail server drama started unfolding regardless of their precautions. Interestingly enough, the server didn’t crash but the majority of the applications were refused since their mail server was nearly inaccessible. As a result, ”first come first serve” lottery rules will now determine who gets the desired numeric domain name.
According to several participating registrars, ”The outcome of a lottery of this type cannot be honest, since larger parties and savy programmers can manipulate the outcome of the lottery in their favor, by employing automated mailing systems which open many simultaneous connections into the SIDN e-mail server.”
Legal steps
“This is real mess, a true fiasco. SIDN has heavily underestimated this landrush” said a frustrated participant. “More proof of SIDN’s incompetence”, complains another party, referring to an earlier privacy blunder by Deloitte, partner of SIDN during the numerical domain sunrise period.
Meanwhile a number of customers from various participating registrars are now contemplating what legal steps to take in order to recover “their numerical domains” from the hands of opportunistic hijackers.
SIDN finds the complaints exaggerated.
An enormous increase did indeed occur; about 10,000 new connections per second in fact. The mail server had no choice but to refuse connections. However, if the connection didn’t succeed during the first second, it would have succeeded the second or third second, and so forth.
Participants, who spoke out around 14.00 hours (two hours after the official launch), vehemently object. They indicate that ‘ of the hundreds of applications only a tiny portion had gone through by 14:00 hours’.
SIDN replied that “We were indeed very busy, but our mail server did not crash. During the first hour and a half 35,000 applications were received successfully and we have taken all the needed measures to ensure an honest process. The fact that it was difficult to get a connection during the initial phase of the landrush was anticipated and cannot be avoided”.
Eurid Systems Superiority
Critics countered those arguments by directing more blame toward the mail server methods used by SIDN. Critics wonder why SIDN didn’t chose the same methods used by Eurid during the .eu landrush. Eurid assigned all participants their own channel to prevent them from opening several connections at the same time. Furthermore, Eurid didn’t use regular e-mail but instead the more efficient Extensible Provisioning protocol (EPP), where small xml-packets are sent.
Although technically much sounder, even the .eu launch went wrong. However, this only happened because several dishonest parties acquired multiple channels under different names.
On Friday afternoon the first .nl numerical domain landrush phase came to an end. This will allow SIDN to process all the requests they received. And thanks to the controversial lottery rules, all double, triple, etc… applications will be relentlessly eliminated.
Source: DomainNews.nl Article - Friday February 30th, 2008