IPv6 is go for launch

Share This February 4th, 2008 Graham

Today, the 4th of February 2008, is going to be an important milestone in the history of the Internet. IANA’s General Operations Manager – Barbara Roseman – made an announcement at the end of last year that there was going to be a major change in the DNS system that would allow the deployment of IPv6 on the Internet to begin in earnest.

The change involves adding IPv6 address glue to a handful of the root DNS servers on the Internet and this is critical to allowing IPv6 only devices to be able to function properly in the future.

The root or ‘.’ as it is sometimes known is the base of the DNS structure that provides referrals to all the locations of the top level domains (TLD) such as .com and .org and the country domains (ccTLD) such as .za and .uk. A number of the nameservers that are responsible for publishing these root records have been able to answer queries over IPv6 for a long time. Due to the fact that these addresses have not (until today) been published on the root hints and distributed to the world, they have not been used very much.

Today’s change over is very significant for DNS administrators around the world as it also tests a kind of jumbo DNS message that has never been used for something as critical as the DNS root. Since IPv6 addresses are considerably larger than their predecessors the amount of data that is being given out by the root servers is now exceeding what was long thought to be a hard limit of the DNS system. Some of the brightest minds in the DNS world have applied their minds to the problem and they seem confident that we will overcome this boundary without any major glitches.

South Africa’s .co.za domain registry that is run by UniForum has often been criticized for its backward approach to DNS. They have however outshone themselves in this instance and beaten IANA by announcing on Friday the 1st February that they too are now accepting IPv6 addresses for domain registrations.

So what exactly does this mean for the end consumer? Very little really!

The DNS is something that very few users will ever have to interact with directly. Although every action that you perform on the Internet starts with a DNS lookup – this most often happens completely transparently.

What this does mean however is that a number of the excuses that ISP’s and network admins around the world were using to delay their deployment of IPv6 have now fallen away. IPv6 is no longer a pipe dream – it is now at the core of the Internet and gaining ground every day.

Yves Poppe provides the analogy of repotting the Internet. IPv6 is not going to change very much about the Internet that we have grown to know an love. But in order to sustain its growth we are going to have transplant it all into a much bigger container.

Entry Filed under: General,General IT,Telecoms,World Wide Web