bind9/doc/draft/draft-ietf-dnsext-ipv6-addresses-02.txt

DNSEXT Working Group                                    Randy Bush (ed.)
                                                      Alain Durand (ed.)
                                                          Bob Fink (ed.)
                                                Olafur Gudmundsson (ed.)
                                                         Tony Hain (ed.)
INTERNET-DRAFT                                                 June 2002

<draft-ietf-dnsext-ipv6-addresses-02.txt>

Updates: RFC 1886, RFC 2673, RFC 2874



                  Representing IPv6 addresses in DNS.


Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
   all provisions of Section 10 of RFC 2026.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups.  Note that
   other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
   Drafts.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as ``work in progress.''

   The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
   http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt

   The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
   http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html

   Comments should be sent to the authors or the DNSEXT WG mailing list
   namedroppers@ops.ietf.org

   This draft expires on December 31, 2002.

   Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002).  All rights reserved.






Expires 31/December/2002         DNSEXT                         [Page 1]

INTERNET-DRAFT  Representation of IPv6 addresses in DNS.       June 2002


Abstract

   This document clarifies and updates the standards status of RFCs that
   define direct and reverse map of IPv6 addresses in DNS. This document
   moves the A6 and Bit label specifications to experimental status.




1 - Introduction

   The IETF had begun the process of standardizing two different address
   formats for IPv6 addresses AAAA[RFC1886] and A6[RFC2874] and both are
   at proposed standard. This had led to confusion and conflicts on
   which one to deploy. It is important for deployment that any
   confusion in this area be cleared up, as there is a feeling in the
   community that having more than one choice will lead to delays in the
   deployment of IPv6. The goal of this document is to clarify the
   situation.

   This document also discusses issues relating to the usage of Binary
   Labels [RFC 2673] to support the reverse mapping of IPv6 addresses.

   This document is based on extensive technical discussion on various
   relevant working groups mailing lists and a joint DNSEXT and NGTRANS
   meeting at the 51st IETF in August 2001. This document attempts to
   capture the sense of the discussions and reflect them in this
   document to represent the consensus of the community.

   The main arguments and the issues are covered in a separate
   document[Tradeoff] that reflects the current understanding of the
   issues. This document summarizes the outcome of these discussions.

   The issue of the root of reverse IPv6 address map is outside the
   scope of this document and is covered in a different
   document[RFC3152].















Expires 31/December/2002         DNSEXT                         [Page 2]

INTERNET-DRAFT  Representation of IPv6 addresses in DNS.       June 2002


1.1 Standards action taken

   This document changes the status of RFCs 2673 and 2874 from Proposed
   Standard to Experimental.

2 - IPv6 addresses: AAAA RR vs A6 RR

   Working group consensus as perceived by the chairs of the DNSEXT and
   NGTRANS working groups is that:

   a) AAAA records are preferable at the moment for production
      deployment of IPv6, and

   b) that A6 records have interesting properties that need to be
      better understood before deployment.

   c) It is not known if the benefits of A6 outweigh the costs and
      risks.


2.1 Rationale

   There are several potential issues with A6 RRs that stem directly
   from the feature that makes them different from AAAA RRs: the ability
   to build up addresses via chaining.

   Resolving a chain of A6 RRs involves resolving a series of what are
   nearly-independent queries.  Each of these sub-queries takes some
   non-zero amount of time, unless the answer happens to be in the
   resolver's local cache already.  Other things being equal, we expect
   that the time it takes to resolve an N-link chain of A6 RRs will be
   roughly proportional to N.  What data we have suggests that users are
   already impatient with the length of time it takes to resolve A RRs
   in the IPv4 Internet, which suggests that users are not likely to be
   patient with significantly longer delays in the IPv6 Internet, but
   terminating queries prematurely is both a waste of resources and
   another source of user frustration.  Thus, we are forced to conclude
   that indiscriminate use of long A6 chains is likely to lead to
   increased user frustration.

   The probability of failure during the process of resolving an N-link
   A6 chain also appears to be roughly proportional to N, since each of
   the queries involved in resolving an A6 chain has roughly the same
   probability of failure as a single AAAA query.

   Last, several of the most interesting potential applications for A6
   RRs involve situations where the prefix name field in the A6 RR
   points to a target that is not only outside the DNS zone containing



Expires 31/December/2002         DNSEXT                         [Page 3]

INTERNET-DRAFT  Representation of IPv6 addresses in DNS.       June 2002


   the A6 RR, but is administered by a different organization entirely.
   While pointers out of zone are not a problem per se, experience both
   with glue RRs and with PTR RRs in the IN-ADDR.ARPA tree suggests that
   pointers to other organizations are often not maintained properly,
   perhaps because they're less susceptible to automation than pointers
   within a single organization would be.

2.2 Recommended standard action

   Based on the perceived consensus, this document recommend that RFC
   1886 stay on standards track and be advanced, while moving RFC 2874
   to Experimental status.

3 - Bitlabels in the reverse DNS tree

   RFC 2673 defines a new DNS label type.  This was the first new type
   defined since RFC 1035[RFC1035]. Since the development of 2673 it has
   been learned that deployment of a new type is difficult since DNS
   servers that do not support bitlabels reject queries containing bit
   labels as being malformed. The community has also indicated that this
   new label type is not needed for mapping reverse addresses.

3.1 Rationale

   The hexadecimal text representation of IPv6 addresses appears to be
   capable of expressing all of the delegation schemes that we expect to
   be used in the DNS reverse tree.

3.2 Recommended standard action

   RFC 2673 standard status is to be changed from Proposed to
   Experimental. Future standardization of these documents is to be done
   by the DNSEXT working group or its successor.

4 DNAME in IPv6 reverse tree

   The issues for DNAME in the reverse mapping tree appears to be
   closely tied to the need to use fragmented A6 in the main tree: if
   one is necessary, so is the other, and if one isn't necessary, the
   other isn't either. Therefore, in moving RFC 2874 to experimental,
   the intent of this document is that use of DNAME RRs in the reverse
   tree be deprecated.









Expires 31/December/2002         DNSEXT                         [Page 4]

INTERNET-DRAFT  Representation of IPv6 addresses in DNS.       June 2002


5 Acknowledgments

   This document is based on input from many members of the various IETF
   working groups involved in this issues. Special thanks go to the
   people that prepared reading material for the joint DNSEXT and
   NGTRANS working group meeting at the 51st IETF in London, Rob
   Austein, Dan Bernstein, Matt Crawford, Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino,
   Christian Huitema.  Number of other people have made number of
   comments on mailing lists about this issue including Andrew W.
   Barclay, Robert Elz, Johan Ihren, Edward Lewis, Bill Manning, Pekka
   Savola, Paul Vixie.

6 - Security Considerations:

   As this document specifies a course of action, there are no direct
   security considerations. There is an indirect security impact of the
   choice, in that the relationship between A6 and DNSSEC is not well
   understood throughout the community, while the choice of AAAA does
   leads to a model for use of DNSSEC in IPv6 networks which parallels
   current IPv4 practice.


7 - IANA Considerations:

   None.

Normative References:

[RFC1035]  P. Mockapetris, ``Domain Names - Implementation and
           Specification'' STD 13, RFC 1035, November 1987.

[RFC1886]  S. Thompson, C. Huitema, ``DNS Extensions to support IP
           version 6'', RFC 1886, December 1995.

[RFC2673]  M. Crawford  ``Binary Labels in the Domain Name System``, RFC
           2673, August 1999.

[RFC2874]  M. Crawford, C. Huitema, ``DNS Extensions to Support IPv6
           Address Aggregation and Renumbering'', RFC 2874, July 2000.

[RFC3152]  R. Bush, ``Delegation of IP6.ARPA'', RFC 3152 also BCP0049,
           August 2001,

Informative References

[Tradeoff] R. Austein, ``Tradeoffs in DNS support for IPv6'', Work in
           progress, draft-ietf-dnsext-ipv6-dns-tradeoffs-xx.txt, June
           2002.



Expires 31/December/2002         DNSEXT                         [Page 5]

INTERNET-DRAFT  Representation of IPv6 addresses in DNS.       June 2002


Editors Address

      Randy Bush         <randy@psg.com>
      Alain Durand       <alain.durand@sun.com>
      Bob Fink           <fink@es.net>
      Olafur Gudmundsson <ogud@ogud.com>
      Tony Hain          <hain@tndh.net>

Full Copyright Statement

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002).  All Rights Reserved.

   This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
   others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
   or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
   and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any
   kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
   included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
   document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
   the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
   Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of
   developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for
   copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be
   followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than
   English.

   The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
   revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.

   This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
   "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
   TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
   BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION
   HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
   MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."
















Expires 31/December/2002         DNSEXT                         [Page 6]