What has the EU ever done for us? Released a DNS server as open source!

We learn from Joinup that Yadifa, the DNS server developed to administer the .eu top level domain (TLD), has been released as open source by Eurid, the not-for-profit organisation which manages the .eu domain registry.

Eurid uses Yadifa alongside Bind, one of two other commonly used open source DNS systems.

Yafida was published officially on 28th June 2012 at a meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) taking place in Prague in the Czech Republic.

Explaining the decision, a Eurid spokesman stated: “Both NSD and Bind have their strengths and flaws. We added Yadifa to strengthen our infrastructure”. Yadifa can handle more queries, loads DNS information faster and has a smaller memory footprint than BIND or NSD.

“It was simply the most practical to add our own [DNS server]”, says Peter Janssen, chief technical officer at Eurid. “This is software for a very specific niche: TLD registries must be able to respond to hundreds of thousands of requests per second.”

Yadifa is published using the BSD 3-clause licence, whilst the ‘.eu’ TLD itself was created in 2000 following a decision by the European Council at their Lisbon meeting.

Update, 01/07/12: on 1st July, the same day that this article was posted, mobile data roaming charges were also capped throughout the EU, with the maximum price set at €0.29 per minute from 1 July, dropping to €0.24 later in 2012 and €0.19 in 2014.