6 IPv6 and DNS

IPv6 Basics, Version 1.2e

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6.1 IPv6 and the DNS tree ..................................................................3

6.2 IPv6 new Ressource Record Types ............................................4

IPv6 Basics, Version 1.2e

T.O.P. BusinessInteractive GmbH

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6.1 IPv6 and the DNS tree

In module 6 of TCP/IP Basics you learned about the domain name system DNS. You learned
that DNS is based on TCP and UDP and there are DNS clients, called resolvers, and DNS
servers that are queried by DNS clients to resolve information. DNS is perhaps the most
important application layer protocol for IPv6. Without DNS mail routing wouldnt work, the
world wide web could not provide virtual hosts, that means multiple web sites on a single IP
address would not work and so on.
You know already that DNS is a distributed database with an hierarchical structure. The
forward lookup zones are used to perform a mapping from a DNS name to an IP address.
The DNS name gets more specific as you go further into the DNS tree. You learned that a
in-addr.arpa domain exists. That is used to go the other direction, to map a IP address to a
DNS name. This time the address gets more specific while you walk from the beginning to
the end of the address, deeper into the DNS tree. The corresponding DNS domain therefor
looks a little confusing at first cause it is written backwards. To use the existing DNS system
with IPv6 some extensions had to be made.
Forward lookups can be integrated easily because it is possible in DNS to map one name to
more than one address. If you query a DNS server you get a long list of addresses. Look
what happens if www.google.de is queried for example. Two IP addresses are received (IPv4
in this example). Within the DNS tree the arpa domain has been extended with the IPv6
domain to map IPv4 addresses to DNS names. The corresponding reverse mapping for a
IPv6 address is constructed in an analogously way to IPv4, it's just much longer and
unfortunately more confusing. In this example we don't show all the zeros.

IPv6 Basics, Version 1.2e

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6.2 IPv6 new Ressource Record Types

Within DNS servers and the DNS network protocol a special DNS database format is used to
organize DNS. We need to know a little about that to understand how IPv6 fits in here. The
database consists of so called Resource Records (RRs). There are different types of RRs.
The A for address record maps a name to an IP address.
There are many other types of RRs, another example used for mail routing is the MX record
already mentioned. It simply points to an DNS name where a mail server for a specific
domain resides with additional parameters. To let name servers distinguish between IPv6
and IPv4 in forward lookup zones, the AAAA record has been added. Its called AAAA
because the IP addresses in IPv6 are 4 times the size of IP addresses in IPv4.
A second specification also exists using the A6 resource record type, but it is unlikely to be
used in practice. Only the AAAA record is widely implement in DNS servers. No special
modifications were needed for reverse mapping. A PTR Pointer record is used for both IPv6
and IPv4. IPv4 and IPv6 can coexist in DNS. If you query www.tbig.net for example, you may
have V4 and V6 answers if the destination implements both technologies.

IPv6 Basics, Version 1.2e

T.O.P. BusinessInteractive GmbH

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