[ipv6-wg at ripe.net] ICANN Board to implement IPv6 in root servers

Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch at muada.com> writes:

Hi Iljitsch,

>>> proceed with adding AAAA glue [name server] records to the
>>> delegations  of those TLDs that request it,
>
>>> And what about the root servers themselves?
>
>> Well, what about them?
>
>> Not that I'm particularly against v6 transport to the roots, but I'd
>> be curious to know exactly what problem you believe that you would
>> solve that way.
>
> Well, what problem does having v6 glue records for tld delegations
> solve?

The TLD has an "owner" that presumably has a wish for what transport
it sees use for. If v6 is in that set I believe it would be wrong not
to give out v6 glue from the parent (given some thought has been given
to packet size issues and similar things, all covered in the RSSAC
advisory).

Wrt to the root zone, though, in reality no one in a sane mind would
want to run DNS without the ability to look up data regardless of
whether a particular zone is served over v4, v6 or both. And that goes
for the root zone just as any other zone.

In reality the major point in v6 transport for the root zone would be
as a "show of faith" in IPv6 being "ready" (which is good), rather
than any sort of short term technical necessity.

> If the whole chain is IPv6-capable that means you no longer have to
> depend on v4 connectivity to reach v6 sites. Eventually we'll want to
> switch off v4 because of the support costs, of course. But in the mean
> time this means better protection against connectivity problems.

I agree that once it's time to turn off v4 (which will probably not
happen during either your nor my active career) v6 roots are
needed. Until then they are mostly a convenience that will possibly
help a little now and then.

As to connectivity problems, I believe that to be mostly a red
herring. If you lose your v4 lookup capability then you just lost
99.9% of the DNS hierarchy. That will cause you all sorts of
problems. The very least of those problems will be the lack of access
to the roots, since they serve a very small data set, all the relevant
parts of which you have already cached.

The only folks that will have problems with a root access during a
hypothetical v4 connectivity outage are the folks that either just
flushed their cache (small percentage) or are broken somehow so they
beat on the roots all the time (large percentage).

But, not to give a wrong impression, I want to point out that I'm
*for* v6 transport to the roots, just as I'm for v6 glue for the
TLDs. And I'm happy that the latter issue after an unbelievably long
wait is finally over.

Johan