Revision [505]
This is an old revision of HowYouCanHelp made by BrianKoontz on 2007-07-20 01:22:00.
In General
The OpenNIC is a young project and has some difficult challenges to deal with to establish itself. Most of the real technical issues have been dealt with, but new ones will always crop up; it seems to be in the nature of computers and networking. The most important issues, however, are social. The established DNS system and the corporations who control are very large and very rich and are, in general, not fond of the idea that the users should own the DNS system; they are simply making too much money from it.
If you are interested in keeping up with the project's growth and status, you should at least join the OpenNIC announcements list or, if you are interested in helping decide how the OpenNIC should be run, join the discussion list. Instructions for how to subscribe to either list are on the MailingLists page.
As a User
The first thing to do is to contact the administrator of the server for which you are configured to resolve DNS. This will generally be either the tech support group at your ISP or the IT/Support group at your office or company. By only resolving the LegacyDNS Legacy TLDs, they are restricting your ability to see a growing part of the general Internet.
If your ISP or IT support folks are not interested in supporting OpenNIC as a network-wide facility on their network you can still resolve OpenNIC names by ConfiguringYourComputer configuring your personal computer to use a server that does.
As an Administrator
Obviously, the first step is to set your server to use OpenNIC. In addition, however, you could also open access to resolve on your server as a VolunteerHosts Tier 2 public name server for the OpenNIC. This will help distribute the load on general name resolution.
To get involved in maintaining the OpenNIC itself, you could also volunteer to organize a new TLD within OpenNIC and arrange service for it.
As a Programmer
We are developing a set of utilities and applications both for automating the OpenNIC itself and to help users and administrators switch their machines to OpenNIC. In the long run, the suggestion has been raised that we should begin work on new name resoltion protocols and software for the existing protocols. If you are interested in working on these projects, please MailingLists join the discussion list and let us know.
