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Are Domain Name Registrars Ready for IPv6?

Now that ICANN has added IPv6 name servers for the root zone, and that many registries have enabled IPv6 on their DNS servers, I thought it would have been easy to update the DNS records pointing to my domain to mention a IPv6-only DNS server. This way, we could have native name resolution end-to-end in IPv6. We are not there yet, it seems.

The web interface my registrar (Gandi) uses does not allow IPv6 addresses. Their support desk informed me that they do not yet handle IPv6 addresses in their web forms.

There is obvious workarounds, of course. One is to assign both a IPv4 and a IPv6 address to the DNS server, as long as it is in under another domain. However, if the DNS server is under the same domain, a glue record would need to be inserted in the TLD zone file. This is currently not possible, at least with the tools provided to the average domain name user.

I am really looking forward to the IPv6 workshop that ALAC is planning at the Paris meeting of ICANN next June and see with other constituencies how these showstoppers can be addressed.

By Patrick Vande Walle, All around Internet governance troublemaker

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Comments

jeroen  –  Apr 4, 2008 6:48 PM

We have been trying to gather all IPv6-glue able and also the registrars which don’t have it yet and possibly with their status of when/if it does come at:

http://www.sixxs.net/faq/dns/?faq=ipv6glue

Of course, as stated on the page, updates are always welcome.
There are fortunately quite a few registrars which can do it for you, even through their webinterface.

John Ruff  –  Apr 8, 2008 2:47 AM

I have IPv6 AAAA records through www.gkg.net since Jul2006.  I’ve been very pleased with their service and the ability to configure my DNS zones easily.  I have four machines with records 4A records connected from home through a single go6.net 6in4 tunnel.

Chris Hills  –  Jun 8, 2008 6:18 PM

I also use Gandi for my domains, the primary being chaz6.com (the “6” is for IPv6!). I emailed Gandi support about IPv6 glue and they told me they hope to support it soon. It seems that they cannot currently even add the records manually.

IPv6 Support at name.com Sean Leach  –  Jul 13, 2010 9:03 PM

We have full IPv6 support at name.com.  You can add both IPv4 and IPv6 glue through our web interface.  Our DNS platform also has native IPv6 support.

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