It is finally happening!

As of 02/04/08 (cute, eh?) ICANN/IANA will be adding AAAA (”Quad A”) records for 4 of the Root Servers.

Why is this news-worthy, you ask?

First off - any change to the DNS root zone is news.
Secondly - this means that, for the first time, it is feasible to resolve some other node’s name to an address (that is what DNS is for, after all) WITHOUT USING ANY IPv4. Until this change occurs, there was at least a tiny little bit of IPv4 involved, and without that IPv4 piece this wouldn’t so much work.

The official announcement:

On 4 February 2008, IANA will add AAAA records for the IPv6 addresses of the four root servers whose operators have requested it. A technical analysis of inserting IPv6 records into the root has been done by a joint working group of ICANN’s Root Server System Advisory Committee and Security and Stability Advisory Committee, a report of which can be found at http://www.icann.org/committees/security/sac018.pdf. Network operators should take whatever steps they feel appropriate to prepare for the inclusion of AAAA records in response to root queries.

(The last line there is a bit of a heads-up to network/firewall/DNS administrators … don’t be blindly filtering TCP/53 and ensure your infrastructure supports EDNS0)

This decision is largely based on previous research work, for this background information (and some great insights into how DNS really works, in case you aren’t intimate with it) check here, here and here

Also, more comments & information available at Ars Technica

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 1:12 pm and is filed under TJ Evans, Blog: IPv6. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.