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1. Introduction

1. Introduction​

Current support for the storage of Internet addresses in the Domain Name System (DNS) [1,2] cannot easily be extended to support IPv6 addresses [3] since applications assume that address queries return 32-bit IPv4 addresses only.

To support the storage of IPv6 addresses in the DNS, this document defines the following extensions:

  • A resource record type is defined to map a domain name to an IPv6 address.

  • A domain is defined to support lookups based on address.

  • Existing queries that perform additional section processing to locate IPv4 addresses are redefined to perform additional section processing on both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

The changes are designed to be compatible with existing software. The existing support for IPv4 addresses is retained. Transition issues related to the co-existence of both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in the DNS are discussed in [4].

The IP protocol version used for querying resource records is independent of the protocol version of the resource records; e.g., IPv4 transport can be used to query IPv6 records and vice versa.

This document combines RFC 1886 [5] and changes to RFC 1886 made by RFC 3152 [6], obsoleting both. Changes mainly consist in replacing the IP6.INT domain by IP6.ARPA as defined in RFC 3152.