Updated: On May 27th CIRA announced that TBR registrations will resume June 1st 2005.

May 24th, 2005. CIRA sent us a notice today that they have cancelled today's TBR run and will not be doing anymore TBR runs until they have had made a review of the current TBR process and examined a few alternatives.

Today's run was cancelled because at least a few registrars were locked out of it due to some sort of software error.

The reasons for the suspension are a little more complex. Some one has apparently been disrupting the TBR procedures for the last month or so. Somewhere the description "Denial of Service" (DOS) attack was used. I believe most of the registrars believe this was one of the registrars trying to upset the system and take advantage of the resulting chaos. CIRA implimented some changes last week to try to stop some of this abuse (with limited results apparently) and then they seem to have made more changes on the weekend, which misfired during today's run.

To some degree we were fortunate. We were locked out of today's run, but apparently we either had a lot of orders that no other registrars had, or our competition was also locked out and less agile than we were, as we processed a high percentage of our TBR orders _after_ the TBR period closed and CIRA has said that those registrations will stand.

There is speculation amongst the registrars that CIRA may replace the existing system with a carousel system similar to the one that they originally "launched" with back on November 8th of 2000.

(With a carousel, all the registrars load their desired domains a queue of their own. CIRA then basically arranges the queues in a circle, and then proceeds to pick one domain from each queue and continues to do that until all the queues are empty.)

BareMetal's current plan is to continue queuing orders as normal, and we will adapt our system to whatever CIRA impliments.

-Tom Brown, President. 2005/05/24