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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: ipv6/v4 naming nomenclature [Was: Apple Air...]
Barrett Lyon wrote: > > On Sep 18, 2007, at 1:30 PM, David Conrad wrote: [..] >> On Sep 18, 2007, at 5:45 AM, Jeroen Massar wrote: >>> Please please please, for the sake of a semi-'standard', please only use [..] >> What RFC (or other standards publication) is this documented in? > > Where did the www.ipv6 and www.ipv4 "standard" come from? Note my clear use of >>semi<< and >>'standard'<< and mind the quotes. Also note that for instance an IETF "standard" is only a standard when something in very common use for quite some time. Maybe this would be a good one to jot down as an Informational/BCP kind of document. It is something which is in use by a lot of sites who have been enabled with IPv6 for about the last 10 years and needed a way to distinct IPv4 and IPv6 variants of their hosts. Remember, before that people on NANOG started noticing the existence of IPv6 in the last few months, and before we had the 6bone with 3ffe::/16 there was also a 6bone with 5f00::/8 (RFC1897, which I really had to look up as my bear is not that long ;), oddly enough that is even before most people even had internet or knew that it existed. > As for > end-users such as normal non-network people, having a standard that adds > more characters than necessary (that eventually may become arbitrary) > seems rather silly. It is not meant to be used by end-users. Those should simply Google/Yahoo/Baidu for the description of the site and get the content and not be bother with remembering hostnames, let them use bookmarks or something, then they at least won't be caught by typo-squatters who are dominating the DNS system. It is only a semi-'standard' which is in use by network operators who didn't want to remember the AAAA or A for a hostname while being able to choose a protocol to ping/telnet/ssh/etc as there was a time when we already had IPv6 but some tools (yes, including PuTTY ;) did not allow selection of either IPv4 or IPv6 protocols. But also allowing the hosts to have an AAAA + A so that a tool could pick the protocol that was available. Sometimes you want to select that thus using: hostname.example.com A + AAAA hostname.ipv6.example.com AAAAA hostname.ipv4.example.com A solved that problem without having to add support for a '-6' or '-4' switch for IPv6 and IPv4 respectively into all tools that one uses. Some code doesn't come with source and some people don't want to patch it up so this is a perfect way to solve it. As mentioned above, this is for people who want to pick the version of IP protocol used. End-users don't even know what "IP" is, and they also should not know and they definitely should not have to care. As such, when you think that your site is 'working fine' over IPv4, then add an "A" record to it, when you think that IPv6 is fine, add an AAAA record, otherwise, have a trick like http://www.braintrust.co.nz/ipv6wwwtest/ and test if your users can reach the IPv6 variant or not. Most likely they won't have IPv6 enabled yet, if they have then great :) > Why wouldn't w4.<domain> or w6.<domain> suffice for > this purpose rather than making it overly scientific? It would suffice, it just is not what is in use. Also some people like to actually name OTHER things than their 'www' with it. The trend for that seems to be more that you can ignore the 'www' portion anyway and just http://youtube.com or http://google.com work. Also, I know a certain company using 'w3' for intranet-only websites, while using 'www' for internet websites. Greets, Jeroen Attachment:
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