LibIDN and iputils-ping

"Cool" I thought after I'd registered my first top-level-domain containing a special character. But why the heck does it take so long to set it up? Even after 24 hours the DNS wasn't working, but.. oh wait! Firefox was able to resolve my adress. Why then, wasn't I able to ping the host? The answer is simple: The ping program installed on my system doesn't make use of libidn, which is required to turn domain names containing special characters to ascii-strings.

What can you do when the developers of the iputils don't want to use this library? Correct! Do it yourself. :-) After writing 5 lines of code I had my own Version of "ping" with libidn support. You can download the source here (orignal taken from a debian repository using apt-get source). When compiling the package you need to have the libidn library installed on your system (on debian you can use the version available over the package system).

The compiled version of ping has to be owned by root and in order to make users able to start ICMP request you also have to chmod u+s the binary. Have fun! :D

ganymed~:$ ping nördhus.se

PING xn--nrdhus-wxa.se (217.11.63.111) 56(84) bytes of data.

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