2012/02/06

RFC 3901 - DNS IPv6 Transport Operational Guidelines


Some colleagues in the Government want to supplement native IPv6 connection to their serving websites but their ISPs told them that nameservers are not yet equipped with IPv6 transport. My colleagues are quite frustrated worrying that IPv6 only hosts will not be able to access the websites because of an IPv6 brokenness in DNS path.

Actually, the ISPs do not quite understand the issue. IETF has published "RFC 3901 - DNS IPv6 Transport Operational Guidelines". In order to preserve name space continuity in the transition to IPv4, the essential points to note are :

- All recursive name servers should be IPv4 only or dual stack hosts.
- All zones should be served by at least one authoritative IPv4 capable host.

IPv6 only hosts will access a dual-stack resolver to find the nameservers and the nameservers do not need to be served with IPv6 transport. So long as nameserves can return AAAA records to resolvers, IPv6 only client hosts can receive the information and hence there is no brokenness in the name resolution process.

I recall that I have answered the same question at least twice.

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