.test

The name test is reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in RFC 2606 (June 1999) as a domain name that is not intended to be installed as a top-level domain (TLD) in the global Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet for production use.

Reserved DNS names

In 1999, the Internet Engineering Task Force reserved the DNS labels example, invalid, localhost, and test so that they may not be installed into the root zone of the Domain Name System.

The reason for reservation of these top-level domain names is to reduce the likelihood of conflict and confusion. This allows the use of these names for either documentation purposes or in local testing scenarios.

Types

As of 2015, IANA distinguishes the following groups of top-level domains:

References

Test

Test, TEST or Tester may refer to:

Science and technology

People

List of Internet top-level domains

This list of Internet top-level domain extensions contains all top-level domains, which are those domains in the DNS root zone of the Domain Name System of the Internet.

The official list of all top-level domains is maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). IANA also oversees the approval process for new proposed top-level domains. As of January 2016, the root domain contains 1205 top-level domains, while a few have been retired and are no longer functional.

Types

As of 2015, IANA distinguishes the following groups of top-level domains:

Original top-level domains

Seven generic top-level domains were created early in the development of the Internet, and pre-date the creation of ICANN in 1998.

Single UNIX Specification

The Single UNIX Specification (SUS) is the collective name of a family of standards for computer operating systems, compliance with which is required to qualify for to use the "UNIX" trademark. The core specifications of the SUS are developed and maintained by the Austin Group, which is a joint working group of IEEE, ISO JTC 1 SC22 and The Open Group. If an operating system is submitted to The Open Group for certification, and passes conformance tests, then it is termed to be compliant with a UNIX standard such as UNIX 98 or UNIX 03.

Very few BSD and Linux-based operating systems are submitted for compliance with the Single UNIX Specification, although system developers generally aim for compliance with POSIX standards, which form the core of the Single UNIX Specification.

History

1980s: Motivation

The SUS emerged from a mid-1980s project to standardize operating system interfaces for software designed for variants of the Unix operating system. The need for standardization arose because enterprises using computers wanted to be able to develop programs that could be used on the computer systems of different manufacturers without reimplementing the programs. Unix was selected as the basis for a standard system interface partly because it was manufacturer-neutral.

Year 2038 problem

The Year 2038 problem is an issue for computing and data storage situations in which time values are stored or calculated as a signed 32-bit integer, and this number is interpreted as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 ("the epoch"). Such implementations cannot encode times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038 (21 years' time), a problem similar to but not entirely analogous to the "Y2K problem" (also known as the "Millennium Bug"), in which 2-digit values representing the number of years since 1900 could not encode the year 2000 or later. Most 32-bit Unix-like systems store and manipulate time in this "Unix time" format, so the year 2038 problem is sometimes referred to as the "Unix Millennium Bug" by association.

Technical cause

The latest time that can be represented in Unix's signed 32-bit integer time format is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038 (2,147,483,647 seconds after 1 January 1970). Times beyond that will "wrap around" and be stored internally as a negative number, which these systems will interpret as having occurred on 13 December 1901 rather than 19 January 2038. This is caused by integer overflow. The counter "runs out" of usable bits, "increments" the sign bit instead, and reports a maximally negative number (continuing to count up, toward zero). Resulting erroneous calculations on such systems are likely to cause problems for users and other relying parties.