As you would expect, most of ICANN’s external services, including this blog, are available over IPv6 as well as IPv4. And at the request of the ICANN Board, a regular comparative measure of IPv6 use at the ICANN and IANA websites has been provided to them for months.  The good news is that the trend [...]

{ 5 comments }

Because IPv6 is so much larger than IPv4, the IETF has been able to structure the address space more neatly.  Consequently, it is easier to distinguish between different address types based on the first few characters in the address, rather than having to refer to registry, as is often the case with IPv4. Nonetheless, there [...]

{ 0 comments }

We always try to have a new ICANN Start podcast episode available to you by the first of each month, and the 1 June episode has arrived early. This month’s episode discusses ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement. If you’re not familiar with it, perhaps you should be — more than 900 ICANN registrars have signed it, [...]

{ 0 comments }

Some IPv4 /8s have been used to number IP networks in an unofficial and improper way. That is, they have been used without being properly allocated and registered in a public Whois database. In most cases these networks are mostly private, used internally in their organization, and so the addresses are not seen in the Internet’s routing system. The organizations using these addresses have relied on the overall availability of IPv4 addresses so that there was no pressing need to allocate all of the /8s that IANA manages. With the decreasing IANA free pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses, it is now clear that every last one of them will ultimately be allocated to the RIRs.

{ 3 comments }

In managing the root zone, recently we clarified some of the technical conformance criteria for the name servers top-level domain operators use. Before we put the adjusted criteria in place, we did some research to find out real world compliance against some of the metrics. One of the more interesting insights involved looking at network [...]

{ 2 comments }

Last week IANA processed a request to add AAAA records for one of the thirteen DNS root-servers.

L.root-servers.net, operated by ICANN, became the seventh of of the root servers to have it’s IPv6 address records (AAAA) added into the DNS root-zone. The addition of IPv6 service is part of ICANN’s ongoing commitment to act as a leader in enabling IPv6 services throughout the DNS.

The new IPv6 address is 2001:500:3::42

{ 11 comments }

It is sometimes said that ISPs do not offer IPv6 transport and equipment vendors offer just partial IPv6 support because there is no customer demand. The counter argument is often made that consumers can only buy what is on offer so people prefer to buy production quality services and equipment.

Unfortunately, even when production quality IPv6 transport and network infrastructure are available it is not always possible to deploy a completely IPv6 accessible network. One problem is the difficulties domain name registrants have when they ask their domain name registrar to include their IPv6 glue in the DNS. Not many domain name registrars support glue registration for IPv6 addresses. This limits their ability to provide an IPv6 DNS service.

{ 3 comments }