My IPv6 DNS is on a laptop in my room. Of course, it’s not good. First, I have to keep it on 24/365 and it exhausts hot air even in hot summer. Downtown Tokyo is like a hell in summer. It’s super hot and humid and I don’t want anything that would add more heat.

Anyway, it would be better if I could move the server to a VPS or hosting accessible via IPv6. So, I’m now looking for one.

Here’s a list of companies that offer such services.

• IPv6.com: Very catchy domain name, isn’t it? There are no prices of the services on the page and I would need to ask them…

This page also has a list of IPv6 enabled hosting service providers, and I checked them out. Some of them don’t offer IPv6 services anymore (or the pages are hard to find, which is a bad sign).

Some candidates

A guy that I follow on twitter recommended this VPS, and it actually seems pretty good. Unfortunately, no more slots at this point, but I’ll sign up for it as soon as they are avialable.

I’m also trying out a service that a Japanese company offers. It’s very cheap (starting from 490 yen or 5-6 bucks a month), and the service isn’t too bad. If you have the guts to use machine translation etc., it might be an option. Or they might prepare English pages.

So… it would be great if you could try out the service!

Thank you.

Wikipedia

Ok. Let’s start with Wikipedia, which is not the official information of anything, but relatively reliable and easy to get to. Another good thing about it is each entry usually has links to outside resources, some of which are official information while others of which are not.

• There’s a section in the entry of “IPv6 address”.
• List of DNS record types says a bit about AAAA and A6, which has downgraded to “experimental”.
• The page for CNAME has a section for DNAME.

RFC

• RFC 2874: Maybe the first proposal of the use of A6 and DNAME for reverse lookups. Now, this RFC is “experimental”.
• RFC 2652: A new record type, DNAME, is introduced.
• RFC 2673: It’s about “Bit-String Label”, which can be used with DNAME for IPv6 reverse lookups. This RFC is “experimental” as well as 2874.
• RFC 3363: It’s about IPv6 addresses in DNS, saying AAAA records are preferable at the moment of writing. Since it hasn’t been updated by another RFC, it should be still true that it’s better to use AAAA for IPv6 address representation at this moment.
• RFC 3364: Tradeoffs between AAAA and A6.

Other information

This page is from O’Reilly’s “DNS and BIND Fourth Edition”. The book was published in 2001, but not much has changed since then regarding IPv6 in DNS, I guess.

Services

Here are some free IPv6 tunneling services etc.

• GogoNET is an IPv6 portal. It looks a bit messy IMO, but it’s got a lot of information about IPv6. Freenet6 Tunnel is their free IPv6 tunneling service.
• This has only Japanese pages, which sucks for a well-known Japanese Univ. Anyway, it provides a free IPv6 service by Tsukuba Univ. and a start-up from it. So, if you understand Japanese or don’t mind trying the hassle of using machine translation, it can be an option.

I’ll add more info from time to time.

It’s very simple. You just register AAAA records or other ones, and my server will work as the name server for your domain. It’ll be hosted on a machine that can be accessible only via  IPv6.

Actually, I started this simple thing a few months ago (or even before), but it took a long time for me to start working on it seriously. Anyway, it’s coming soon, finally.

I’m more like a programmer not a network engineer, but am very much interested in IPv6 maybe because here in Japan IPv4 addresses are running out. I lived in North America for 3 years in total (from 2005 to 2008) and didn’t hear anybody talk about IPv6.

There are not many services that offer “native” IPv6 connectivity not only in Japan but around the globe. Currently, I use an IPv6 service (Japanese page) provided by my ISP that uses L2TP. I use a cheap netbook running Windows as a “router” for the service. I’m more or less satisfied with it.

I’m now working on a small web service that will offer secondary DNS functionality, with which you can register your DNS servers there and have it do zone transfer, or you simply register entries such as AAAA and have it work as the primary DNS of your domain.

The service will be available on www6.ipv6users.net hopefully soon.