Joao, tl;dr http://www.ð“ŽŸð“€€.net (a.k.a. http://www.xn--5o7dx5d.net/) works!
You rock man.
Details if anyone is interested:
gandi.net understands the question, but it doesn't handle IDN
perfectly. I needed to select the language of the domain name (which is
weird and annoying, because computers are really good about looking
things up in tables, so the site could trivially figure out which
language the name was using).
For some weird reason, Egyptian hieroglyphs are not a language on the
list (although Coptic is, but that's a couple thousand years too modern
for my purposes here). I can choose literally any language and then I
can submit my request... so I was not at all confident that it would
actually work. I picked Armenian or something near the top and it
seemed to accept the order.
But I decided to go for it, even though I was worried that it would
choke. I submitted the order and had a short wait for some problem with
the gandi.net service. It started exactly the minute I submitted my
order, but hopefully that is a coincidence. Surely? :P
It looks cleared up 10 minutes later, and the domain was registered!
I went ahead and used the gandi.net servers, [a-c].dns.gandi.net, which
were giving REFUSED to queries. Anyway, that eventually cleared up too.
I tried updating the zone there to point to my web server, but it took
ages to appear in the DNS. While waiting I set up my own DNS. This
took about 15 minutes, by which time the gandi servers had updated but
I made the switch to my own setup anyway.
For some reason glue under the new domain didn't show up at the
VeriSign gTLD DNS server, although the NS records in .NET were happily
updated. I changed to using an out-of-bailiwick name for the name
servers (same IP addresses) and everything is happy now. (I don't know
whether to blame VeriSign or gandi for this - the beauty of the
registry/registrar model!)
I'm not super-impressed with gandi as a "real registry", although I
fully recognize that what I just did here was a very weird case. I am
glad that it worked at all. :)
Finally,with a bit of Apache configuration we're partying like it's
1999... B.C.!!! w00t!
Note that both Firefox and Chromium refuse to display the
hieroglyphics in the URL bar. My guess is that they display any IDN
that they don't understand as punycode in order to minimize semantic
attacks (I think there is a hieroglyph for the sun that looks like a
circle that I guess could be confused for zero, so maybe this makes
sense? maybe?).
I did need to install some fonts for everything to look correct:
$ sudo apt install fonts-ancient-scripts
As a final note, apparently Egyptian hieroglyphs can read
left-to-right, right-to-left, or top-to-bottom. For the horizontal
versions, the way that the characters are facing show you which way to
read it (that's nice meta-data). I wonder if I need to register a
separate domain for that version? Is there an ICANN policy on this?
Surely this is an important item for some GNSO IDN working group... ;)
Anyway thanks again. :)
Cheers,
--
Shane
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