IPv6

Background

Computers on the Internet have IP addresses. Historically these have been IPv4 addresses that look like this:

203.0.113.1

The IPv4 addressing scheme only supports four billion addresses¹, which sounds like a lot, but many RIRs have already been handed their last block of IPv4 addresses and there will be no more.

IPv6 is a new addressing scheme that supports 340 billion billion billion addresses. IPv6 addresses look like this:

2001:db8:a546:7a::1

All popular operating systems have supported IPv6 for a long time now. Many ISPs are dragging their heels with their deployment of native IPv6 although anyone can get access to the IPv6 Internet today via tunnel providers such as Hurricane Electric.

Metaname support

Some registrars support IPv6 glue records² but Metaname takes IPv6 support to its conclusion with all infrastructure accessible via IPv6 in addition to support for hosting .ip6.arpa zones (reverse DNS for IPv6) on our hosted DNS servers.

Tools

If you have the dig tool then you can check your IPv6 resource records with:

dig @ns1.metaname.net \
  www.yourdomain.co.nz  AAAA

If you prefer host then you can check with:

host -t AAAA  www.yourdomain.co.nz \
  ns1.metaname.net

If you do not have a tool to hand then you can always use an online resolver.

Using tools such as these is preferable to using your local resolver because if you make a mistake in your DNS zone then your ISP's resolver will cache the mistake for the TTL of the record (typically an hour). In such situations your ISP's resolver will respond with the mistakenly input value until its cached entry expires, meaning that it is necessary to wait that hour before the correct value can be obtained from the ISP's resolver even if it has been fixed in the zone.