[93attendees] IETF Meeting NAT64 network

[Stuart Cheshire <[e-mail]>]

I’ve spent the entire week of this IETF meeting on the “ietf-nat64” network, on both my iPhone and my laptop. With just one exception, everything has worked fine and I have not had any problems (from what I’ve heard, the NAT64 network has actually been working *better* than the IPv4 network).

The exception mentioned above was trying to pay my Amazon credit card bill on-line, which involves accessing www.onlinecreditcenter6.com. That domain name appears to have a broken DNS server, which doesn’t answer AAAA queries, and the failure to respond to AAAA queries results in the DNS64 engine returning a SERVFAIL error instead of synthesizing a AAAA record from the IPv4 address record that it does have:

% host www.onlinecreditcenter6.com
www.onlinecreditcenter6.com has address 216.74.188.135
Host www.onlinecreditcenter6.com not found: 2(SERVFAIL)

This seems like a fixable bug in the DNS64 engine. If a server has no IPv6 support, and a broken DNS server that also doesn’t know that IPv6 exists, that should not stand in the way of DNS64/NAT64 creating a communication path to the server’s IPv4 address.

This is reminiscent of my 2008 talk at IETF 72 about the perils of blocking forever waiting for an IPv6 response that will never be coming: <http://www.stuartcheshire.org/IETF72/>

Stuart Cheshire