Starting in mid-November, countries and territories will be able to apply to show domain names in their native language, a major technical tweak to the Internet designed to increase language accessibility.

On Friday, the Internet’s addressing authority approved a Fast-Track Process for applying for an IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) and will begin accepting applications on Nov. 16.

The move comes after years of technical testing and policy development, said the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which held a meeting in Seoul this week.

Currently, domain names can only be displayed using the Latin alphabet letters A-Z, the digits 0-9 and the hyphen, but in future countries will be able to display country-code Top Level Domains (cc TLDs) in their native language. ccTLDs are those that have a two-letter country designation at the end of a domain name.

In reality, the new domain names will be stored in the DNS as sequences of letters and numbers beginning xn-- in order to maintain compatibility with the existing infrastructure. The characters following the xn-- will be used to encode a sequence of Unicode characters representing the country name.

One of the primary concerns with implementing IDNs is the security and stability of the Domain Name System (DNS). That system enables the translation of domain names written with characters and digits into IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, which can then be queried by a Web browser.

ICANN said it would initially allow for a "limited" number of IDNs, which are subject to ICANN’s approval and stability testing. Still, there are likely to be hiccups, ICANN warned.

"The usability of IDNs may be limited, as not all application software is capable of working with IDNs," ICANN said in a59-page proposal dated Sept. 30 that describes the Fast Track process. "It is up to each application developer to decide whether or not they wish to support IDNs. This can include, for example, browsers, email clients, and sites where you sign up for a service or purchase a product and in that process need to enter an e-mail address."

ICANN has set some language restrictions for IDNs: they must be in an official language of a country or territory and have legal status or at minimum "serve as a language of administration."

According to the proposal, ICANN will charge registries US$26,000 for an evaluation processing fee, which can be paid in the local currency. ICANN would also like an annual contribution fee of 3 percent of a registries revenue, which can be as low as 1 percent for low-volume registries. For both fees, registries can request a fee waiver, ICANN said.

One common problem people have is an incorrectly setup mail system. Here is a list of rules that must be followed:
1) hostname must not match any domain that is being used on the system. Example, if you have a domain called domain.com and you want to recieve mail on user@domain.com, you must *not* set your hostname to domain.com. We recommend using server.domain.com instead. You must make sure that you add the A record for server.domain.com so that it resolves.
2) The hostname must be in the /etc/virtual/domains file.
3) The hostname must *not* be in the /etc/virtual/domainowners file.
4) The hostname must resolve. If not, add the required A records to the dns zone such that it does.
5) The directory /etc/virtual/hostname must exist.. (eg: /etc/virtual/server.domain.com). It must not contain any files.
6) Any domains that you want to use for email (eg: domain.com) must be in both the /etc/virtual/domains file and the /etc/virtual/domainowners file. The directory /etc/virtual/domain.com must exist and the files /etc/virtual/domain.com/passwd and /etc/virtual/domain.com/aliases exist.
7) File permissions for virtual pop inboxes should be (not applicable with Dovecot/Maildir):

/var/spool/virtual/domain.com 770 username:mail
/var/spool/virtual/domain.com/* 660 username:mail

If you’ve made any changes to you /etc/exim.conf file and require a fresh copy, you can retrieve one with this guide:
http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=51
Ensure your hostname does not contain any upper case letters.
9) Make sure that your main server IP has a reverse lookup on it.

If you want to disable /webmail for just one domain (for example), one way to do that is to change the Aliases to be within the VirtualHosts instead of 1 global Alias.
To do that, we’ll need to use the virtual_host2.conf template (for apache 2) and use the custom httpd config settings, found in the Admin Level. This guide assumes you’re using apache 2 with custombuild.
1) Setup the custom template so it’s safe from DA updates:

cd /usr/local/directadmin/data/templates/custom
cp ../virtual_host2.conf .

2) Edit the copied virtual_host2.conf file, and insert the following at the top of the file:

|?WEBMAIL=ON|

Then just below the token that says |CUSTOM| (in the same file) add:

|*if WEBMAIL="ON"|
Alias /webmail /var/www/html/webmail/
|*endif|

3) Go to:
Admin Level -> Custom httpd config -> domain.com
In the textarea at the top, insert this one line:

|?WEBMAIL=OFF|

which will shut off webmail for just that one domain.
4) Remove the global Alias from the /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-aliases.conf file.
5) Issue a full user httpd.conf rewrite, then restart apache.

echo "action=rewrite&value=httpd" >> /usr/local/directadmin/data/task.queue
/usr/local/directadmin/dataskq d
/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Create an .htaccess file in your public_html directory with the following code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?domain.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg)$ – [F]

Where domain.com is your domain.

If you wish to change the setup of the VirtualHosts for all domains, you can do so by creating your own custom templates.

cd /usr/local/directadmin/data/templates
cp virtual_host*.conf custom
cd custom

Once you’ve copied the 4 VirtualHost files (or just the ones you want) to the custom directory, you can then edit the new files you’ve just copied. DirectAdmin will always check for the custom file before going to the default ones. Failure to copy the virtual_host*.conf files to the custom directory before modifying them will result in a loss of all changes when DirectAdmin updates itself (the files are overwritten). Note that there are actually 8 virtual_host files, but you only need to worry about the 4 that apply to you. The files with the 2 in them are for apache 2.x. The ones without the 2 in them are for apache 1.3.
Inside the virtual_host*.conf files, you’ll find code that is similar to httpd.conf code, but contains what are known as tokens. These tokens are what will be replaces with specific user data for each domain created.

Available tokens

DOMAIN
the name of the domain. eg: domain.com

IP
the IP address associated with that domain. eg: 192.168.3.4

HOME
The users home directory. eg: /home/gary

ADMIN
The email address of the server admin. webmaster@domain.com

HOSTNAME
The hostname of the server. eg: server.domain.com

SAFE_MODE
ON or OFF if php safe_mode is enabled or not

PHP
ON or OFF if php is enabled or not

CGI
The whole httpd.conf line used to add the Script-Alias

HANDLERS
httpd.conf code holding all apache handlers

MIMETYPE
httpd.conf code holding all apache mime types

USER
the username

GROUP
the users group name (99% of the time, it’s the same as the USER)

DOCROOT
The DocumentRoot of the VirtualHost. This is the path that apache will use to access the data when the ServerName (domain.com) is requested

SUB
for the virtual_host_*sub.conf file, the subdomain name. eg: sub

CUSTOM
custom httpd.conf code to be inserted if the domain.com.cust_httpd file exists. (See Adding custom httpd.conf code the VirtualHost of one domain)

CAROOT
The whole httpd.conf line used to load in the SSLCACertificateFile directive

CERT
The path of the certificate to be used for the domain

KEY
The path of the certificate to be used for the domain

The top of the templates should contain |?CGI=…| and |?DOCROOT=…|. These lines are where the data for the CGI and DOCROOT tokens are set. If cgi is not enabled, this line wil be ignored and the CGI token will be empty. If the domain is suspended, the DOCROOT will be filled the the path of the suspend page. The CAROOT token will be empty unless the User has added a valid CARootCertificate through DA.
You can use tokens when assigning a value to CGI or DOCROOT, just use `TOKEN` instead of |TOKEN|.
Once you are happy with your new virtual_host*.conf files they’ll need to be used in the real httpd.conf files. You can trigger DirectAdmin to rewrite all User httpd.conf files by running:

echo "action=rewrite&value=httpd" >> /usr/local/directadmin/data/task.queue

The command will be added the the task queue which is checked once per minute, so it may be a few minutes before all httpd.conf files have been rewritten. *Note: the main /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf is never overwritten (unless DirectAdmin is reinstalled) so any changes you make will be safe.
Note, that you can also use if-then-else statements if you don’t want all settings to be global. Example, say you want a custom item added, only for 1 domain:

|*if DOMAIN="domain.com"|
#custom item for just this domain
|*endif|

See the if-then-else link for more info on what else you can do with this basic scripting tool.
You can also run actual scripts with database queries, etc… if you wanted using the script portion of the templates.
More info on that here: http://www.directadmin.com/features.php?id=756