CIRA

Canadian International Registry Authority.  Within the framework of this project, Sednove is responsible for setting up of infrastructure of all sites, programming of all web applications.  The initial infrastructure of CIRA was based on Suns servers with Solaris.  he programming of web applications has been done with Perl module for Apache. 

CIRA, Canadian International Registry Authority, is a Canadian non-profit organization; responsible for master domain of the country(ccTLD) for all Canadians in the most efficient and professional way. CIRA manages other registry activities in Canada related to the Internet. CIRA was made an organization in 1998 with a goal to elaborate and run politics in the field of “.ca” domain names and to make a good use of it. Since 1988, the names that end by “.ca” have been registered in a voluntary database by a registrar of “.ca” domain names of the University of British Columbia.

As a result of growing use and commercialization of the Internet, many people in Canadian Internet community noticed that registry rules of the names “.ca” were no longer adequate. In 1997, during an annual Internet conference that was held that year in Halifax, Canadian Internet community suggested reforming the “.ca” field in order to make it more liberal and to speed up the “.ca” registry procedures. The first stage consisted in forming a Comité Consultatif sur le Nom de Domaine Canadien (CCNDC) and establishing a private non-profit organization to administer “.ca” registry. As a result of that, Canadian International Registry Authority was born in 1998. CIRA defined new rules of “.ca” registry. Registry of “.ca” names is done by certified domain “.ca” name registrars that have to be connected securely to the site. Sednove received an assignment from Bernard Turcotte (president of CIRA) to set up an infrastructure necessary for a successful functioning of CIRA. All business regulations were taken care of by lawyers hired by CIRA.

In the beginning, Sednove made a prototype of the site that represented the web architecture, web security, data and connections for the registrars, definition of Oracle datebase, redundancy of information, data backup plans, definition of needs in programming, the site’s storyboard in two official languages and definition of the connection protocol for certified registrars.The site is composed of about 20 Sun servers and is located at Magma in Ottawa. There are 8 web servers and ssl in redundancy guaranteeing a fast and permanent service, 3 XML servers for connection with the registrars, a whois server, an e-mail server for mass mail, 2 dns servers, a firewall server, a data backup server, a development and pre-production server and 2 Oracle servers in redundancy. The software being used is Apache for web servers, XML and ssl, Oracle for database, Legato data backup, Firewall 1 and sendmail for the e-mail. All the programming of the site is done in language of Perl and mod-Perl programming. The web site is entirely managed by Sednove content management tool Up-to-date. The communication personnel of CIRA can modify the contents of the web site.

The project started in January 2000. To get the best out of the infrastructure, Sednove managed a team made out of: an architect of the net, 2 Unix administrators, a Perl developer, a DBA of Oracle, a person in charge of the project, a specialist of data backup and contingency plan, a web developer and computer graphics designer. The project was in constant expansion; nowadays it has a full-time Perl developer and a part-time employee to keep track of the news of the web site.