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7. Supporting IPv6-Only Networks with NAT64 and DNS64

While many IPv6 transition protocols have been standardized and deployed, most are transparent to client devices. The combined use of NAT64 [RFC6146] and DNS64 [RFC6147] is a popular solution that is being deployed and requires changes in client devices. One possible way to handle these networks is for the client device networking stack to implement 464XLAT [RFC6877]. 464XLAT has the advantage of not requiring changes to user space software; however, it requires per-packet translation if the application is using IPv4 literals and does not encourage client application software to support native IPv6. On platforms that do not support 464XLAT, the Happy Eyeballs engine SHOULD follow the recommendations in this section to properly support IPv6-only networks with NAT64 and DNS64.

The features described in this section SHOULD only be enabled when the host detects one of these networks. A simple heuristic to achieve that is to check if the network offers routable IPv6 addressing, does not offer routable IPv4 addressing, and offers a DNS resolver address.

7.1. IPv4 Address Literals​

If client applications or users wish to connect to IPv4 address literals, the Happy Eyeballs engine will need to perform NAT64 address synthesis for them. The solution is similar to "Bump-in-the-Host" [RFC6535] but is implemented inside the Happy Eyeballs library.

When an IPv4 address is passed into the library instead of a hostname, the device queries the network for the NAT64 prefix using "Discovery of the IPv6 Prefix Used for IPv6 Address Synthesis" [RFC7050] and then synthesizes an appropriate IPv6 address (or several) using the encoding described in "IPv6 Addressing of IPv4/IPv6 Translators" [RFC6052]. The synthesized addresses are then inserted into the list of addresses as if they were results from DNS queries; connection attempts follow the algorithm described above (see Section 5).

7.2. Hostnames with Broken AAAA Records​

At the time of writing, there exist a small but non-negligible number of hostnames that resolve to valid A records and broken AAAA records, which we define as AAAA records that contain seemingly valid IPv6 addresses but those addresses never reply when contacted on the usual ports. These can be, for example, caused by:

  • Mistyping of the IPv6 address in the DNS zone configuration

  • Routing black holes

  • Service outages

While an algorithm complying with the other sections of this document would correctly handle such hostnames on a dual-stack network, they will not necessarily function correctly on IPv6-only networks with NAT64 and DNS64. Since DNS64 recursive resolvers rely on the authoritative name servers sending negative ("no error no answer") responses for AAAA records in order to synthesize, they will not synthesize records for these particular hostnames and will instead pass through the broken AAAA record.

In order to support these scenarios, the client device needs to query the DNS for the A record and then perform local synthesis. Since these types of hostnames are rare and, in order to minimize load on DNS servers, this A query should only be performed when the client has given up on the AAAA records it initially received. This can be achieved by using a longer timeout, referred to as the "Last Resort Local Synthesis Delay"; the delay is recommended to be 2 seconds. The timer is started when the last connection attempt is fired. If no connection attempt has succeeded when this timer fires, the device queries the DNS for the IPv4 address and, on reception of a valid A record, treats it as if it were provided by the application (see Section 7.1).

7.3. Virtual Private Networks​

Some Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) may be configured to handle DNS queries from the device. The configuration could encompass all queries or a subset such as "*.internal.example.com". These VPNs can also be configured to only route part of the IPv4 address space, such as 192.0.2.0/24. However, if an internal hostname resolves to an external IPv4 address, these can cause issues if the underlying network is IPv6-only. As an example, let's assume that "www.internal.example.com" has exactly one A record, 198.51.100.42, and no AAAA records. The client will send the DNS query to the company's recursive resolver and that resolver will reply with these records. The device now only has an IPv4 address to connect to and no route to that address. Since the company's resolver does not know the NAT64 prefix of the underlying network, it cannot synthesize the address. Similarly, the underlying network's DNS64 recursive resolver does not know the company's internal addresses, so it cannot resolve the hostname. Because of this, the client device needs to resolve the A record using the company's resolver and then locally synthesize an IPv6 address, as if the resolved IPv4 address were provided by the application (Section 7.1).

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