Support functions for network operations

Based on the experience gained in TEN-34, TEN-155 and GÉANT, DANTE has developed a formal naming scheme which encodes certain pieces of operational and management information into the FQDNs which are used to refer to individual systems and/or to individual interfaces on a particular system (router).

In particular, individual components of this naming system encode the country of a particular PoP location, a particular router in a PoP, a particular interface and the link information to connect to a PoP in a different country. As this system has proven to be very useful for such an environment (see the output of a traceroute command in GÉANT), it has been adopted to also label the components used to implement 6NET.

This system requires the creation (and delegation) of subdomains in 6net.org to support the proposed naming structure. The well-defined (and well-known) ISO3166 2-letter country-codes are used to denote individual PoP locations.

Many of those subdomains in 6net.org have already been delegated to DANTE to support the development of the naming scheme for 6NET and the planning for the roll-out of the network. This approach allows pre-configuration of entries for those components for which the technical details (and the PoP location) have already been specified (by the end of March 2002).

Here is an example of such an initial delegation:

For a complete list of these domains (which might become delegated and populated in due course) refer to Appendix A1: “List of per PoP-Location Support Domains”.

Again, much like for the basic DNS service, other NRENS provide secondary name service for those domains and to make them accessible by IPv6-based transport as soon as possible. In addition to the “default” secondary name service provision by those partners, all NREN partners are urged to eventually implement secondary name service for their respective xx.6net.org domain (e.g.JANET for uk.6net.org., GARR for it.6net.org. and so on). The reason for this approach is to supply name service in close proximity, and to encourage the deployment of the technology and the dissemination of knowledge.

DNS root name server in 2004

By 2004 several root name severs were accessible in IPv6.

There were:

• B at 2001:478:65::53
• F at 2001:500::1035
• H at 2001:500:1::803f:235
• M at 2001:dc3::35

You can consult http://www.root-servers.org/ for updated information.

And we can hope to have IPv6 glue in the root file zone in 2004. Thus a DNS IPv6 only service is possible in the near future.