ASLAN.OPEN-RSC.ORG Ceased operation April 30, 2005

ASLAN, ADNS's Open Root Server Consortium server ceased operations on April 30, 2005. This was due to several factors:

1. ASLAN had not been a root server in ORSC for some time because the operators of ORSC decided to replace it with another server. 
   
2. ASLAN became a resolver, that is, a name server that the public could use to query names in the inclusive namespace. As a root server, ASLAN would only know about the top level domains and would not answer queries for lower level domains except to provide references to the servers handling the top-level domain of the requested address. This is the proper way to operate a root server - as a non-recursive server. As a public resolver, it would attempt to resolve a query completely rather than returning just a reference. 
   
3. In recent months, an analysis of the queries that ASLAN was receiving showed that an increasingly large number of queries were either meant as an attack (denial of service attack) on ASLAN or as an attack on other DNS servers through ASLAN. Please note that the statistics that are shown on the stats archive page (link below) are valid as the bogus data was removed. 
   
4. An increasing amount of our bandwidth was therefore being used for non-productive and sometimes counter-productive purposes.
   
5. ORSC did not seem to have any plan for future expansion and no plans to assist in building credibility in the eyes of internet users. In fact, many technical blunders by the operators of ORSC harmed the Inclusive Namespace cause.

Because of these reasons, ASLAN was decommissioned on April 30, 2005.  ADNS is committed to the Inclusive Namespace and we support other Inclusive Namspace root server network projects. Check back to our website every now and then for more information about our work in this area.

PLEASE NOTE: Our decommissioning of ASLAN does NOT in any way affect your registrations in our TLDs. ADNS's top-level domains are still listed in ORSC as well as most other Inclusive Namespace root networks. ADNS has simply turned off a free service that it provided that was no longer being used in a beneficial way by the community.

As mentioned above, we are keeping the historical ASLAN statistics online. They show the phenomenal growth of the Inclusive Namespace.  to access this archive of ASLAN usage  statistics, click HERE.