Friday, March 26, 2010

Yahoo! Proposes 'Really Ugly Hack' to DNS

Carolyn Duffy Marsan writes on ComputerWorld:

Network engineers from Yahoo are pitching what they admit is a "really ugly hack" to the Internet's Domain Name System, but they say it is necessary for the popular Web content provider to support IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.Major 'Net players mulling IPv6 "whitelist".

Yahoo outlined its proposal for changes to DNS recursive name resolvers at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) held here this week.

Yahoo says it needs a major change to the DNS -- which matches IP addresses with corresponding domain names -- in order to provide IPv6 service without inadvertently cutting off access to hundreds of thousands of visitors. Under Yahoo's proposal, these visitors would continue accessing content via IPv4, the current version of the Internet Protocol.

The reason Yahoo is seeking this change to the DNS is that a significant percentage of Internet users have broken IPv6 connectivity. Web content providers say they need mechanisms to discover that a user's IPv6 connectivity is broken and to switch these users to IPv4 on the fly. Yahoo views DNS as the best place to make this switch.

More here.

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