[arin-ppml] IPv4 Depletion as an ARIN policy concern

[George, Wes E [NTK]]

-----Original Message-----
From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of Lee Howard
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 12:23 PM
To: William Herrin
Cc: arin-ppml at arin.net
Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] IPv4 Depletion as an ARIN policy concern

> The moment I publish a AAAA record

> for my web site, your web browser on your IPv4/IPv6 dual-stacked
> machine will attempt to connect to that AAAA record in preference to
> any A records I've published, will it not?

Yes.  It seems to me that requesting AAAA records over IPv4 is
a bad idea; at least one popular name server now has a now that when
set, will only return AAAA to queries from IPv6 addresses.

[weg] I've been trying to stay out of this discussion, as I think it's not really an ARIN policy-related one anymore (no matter how interesting and animated), but had to respond to this.
As an IPv6-enabled XP user, I beg to differ. I actually think that refusing to respond to IPv4 AAAA queries is a bad idea, unless you can convince MS to release a patch to make AAAA queries via IPv6. Yes, it can lead to problems, but I think there are other ways around it. In terms of the IPv6 transition, it's much easier to install XP's (limited) IPv6 support than it is to get all users to upgrade to a new OS. It would drive individual SPs to need to stand up a proxy DNS server that listens for IPv4 AAAA reqs and does the recursion in IPv6, or risk breaking IPv6 for a large group of customers that would otherwise be capable of supporting it.

Was chatting with some folks during Dearborn about methods to roll out IPv6 that are somewhat more mainstream than building a separate http://ipv6.site.com, but less risky than simply responding with a AAAA for www.site.com, and the same methods that are used to probe for IPv6 capability (loading zero-pixel gifs embedded in the page that call different addresses using an IPv4 server, an IPv6 address and a AAAA record-enabled DNS entry) could be used to determine that the user has "good enough" IPv6 connectivity, and then offer them an IPv6-capable version of the page via a banner that appears for them to click (eg "click to test our site in IPv6"). Depending on the specific implementation, it could be done automatically, done as an opt-in, with our without a cookie to remember status, etc. But either way, it would possibly be a good intermediate step when we're comfortable with our implementation of IPv6, but not sure how well end to end IPv6 connectivity is working and don't necessarily have cycles to whitelist known IPv6-capable networks. I don't have the programming skills, but I'm hoping one of the folks I was talking with will post it as a freely-available script that others can use.

$0.02

Wes George

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