IPv6 The Next Generation - The Records Are Legitimate
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Congratulations! You've now entered nerd level 2 of 4. From here on you are to refrain from wearing deodorant and your pants are to be no less than 6 inches from the top of your high-top shoes. Ready? Good. Now we can move on to how the quad A (AAAA) records for IPv6 addresses were added to four key root DNS servers. By the way, this should be starting to sound at least slightly interesting.
The AAAA records represent IPv6 addresses in the Domain Name System for forward lookups, or the process of determining an IP address for a given host. Barbara Roseman, the general operations manager of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), sent an email in late December announcing, “On 4 February 2008, IANA will add AAAA records for the IPv6 addresses of the four root servers whose operators have requested it.” As you can imagine, there are many network operators who were more than relieved upon hearing this.
According to an article by Sean Michael Kerner, Paul Vixie, president of Internet Systems Consortium and operator of the F root DNS server, had this to say: “This is one of the roadblocks to running an Internet device IPv6-only, and we're very glad to finally see this roadblock removed.”
Fred Clift of the ISP Verio said, “Since the DNS system is distributed across thousands of organizations, nations, companies etc., this is the logical and much needed first step.”
Establishing a viable root system for IPv6 support has been a long process and it's still not finished. It first came to attention when in 2003, the Department of Defense announced a mandatory 2008 deadline for enabling the government network to use IPv6. The ICANN committee DNS Rootserver System Advisory Committee was given this task, and after five years of a bunch of tedious technical obstacles that are way over my head, at least four root server operators showed IPv6 capability and asked ICANN to add them to the root nameserver.
Full IPv6-only support still has some other obstacles to overcome. Vixie at ISC is bemoaning the fact that IPv4 was supposed to be interoperable (dual stack) with IPv6 so that the transition would prove less strenuous. But no one wants to go dual stack until everyone else is forced to because “deploying dual-stack brings no benefit to the deployer, it only benefits the community.” Even the looming IPv4 address space shortage has no effect over the ominous shadow of Internet economics.
Although, Vixie does concede, “This isn't a particular barrier it's a general malaise.” So the question remains: how much longer will we have to wait...for full IPv6 support and for you to click on to the next page already?
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