I found out a few weeks ago how general managers are made.

When I worked for HP, from the summer after my sophomore year in college to 1997, general managers were a big deal.  They ran HP's business units.  Lew Platt was a GM (and later CEO of HP), and now part of highway 87 is named for him.  In fact, the closest I ever got to an HP GM was flipping burgers next to Lew at one of HP's legendary beer busts.

Well, my boss and the CEO got together a few weeks ago and decided that Infoblox should have an IPv6 Center of Excellence, and they made me its GM.  I expect this went down something like the old Life cereal commercial:  "Let's give it to Cricket--he'll do anything!"  But I'm actually very pleased, for a number of reasons (besides getting a snazzy new title).

Infoblox has recognized that IPv6 is key to its success.  We are, after all, an IP address management vendor, and what could represent a bigger change in the world of IP address management than the transition to a new version of IP?  For that matter, what could be a bigger opportunity?

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Yesterday, Infoblox hosted the second annual "Inside Baseball" event, an informal meeting of representatives from companies that work with DNS to discuss strategic and operational issues.  Dyn, Inc., who dreamed up the event and hosted last year's meeting at their headquarters in Manchester, New Hampshire, coordinated registration and proposed a loose agenda.

Attendance was terrific, with representatives from Dyn, ISC, Verisign, Neustar, F5, Secure64, Google, Microsoft, Comcast, Akamai, OpenDNS, Nettica, NoIP, TZO, Cotendo, Cloudflare, CloudFloor, and Cloudfish attending.  (Just kidding.  There's no Cloudfish.  Yet.)

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Here at Infoblox, we’re gearing up for World IPv6 Day.  Our appliances have supported IPv6 for some time now, but we’d never gone to the trouble of providing services over IPv6, mostly for lack of demand.  But we wanted to participate in World IPv6 Day, so we called around for carriers who could provide IPv6 connectivity.

Our IT guys decided to go with Cogent (“one of the world’s largest Internet Service Providers,” so they say), which already had a presence in our colocation facility and so could provide connectivity quickly.  The cost was also very reasonable.

Once the connectivity was set up, IT asked Andy, one of our product managers, and me to test it, since we both have IPv6 networks at home.  I’d set my connectivity up through Hurricane Electric using a free tunnel broker they offer, and so did Andy.

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In a blog entry late last month, I briefly mentioned an issue with stub resolvers that naively send queries for AAAA records (the DNS record type for IPv6 addresses) but then pass the addresses to applications that can’t consume them, causing timeouts.  (I owe credit to Igor Gashinsky at Yahoo!, from whoseIETF presentation I learned about the issue.)  Here’s a little more on that subject.

Many popular web sites that support IPv6 today use separate domain names to point to their sites; witness www.v6.facebook.com and ipv6.google.com. That scheme won’t hold up over time, though.  As IPv6 becomes pervasive, companies won’t willingly slap protocol identifiers in front of their domain names:

-       “For IPv4 customers, go to www.facebook.com.

-       For IPv6 customers, go to www.v6.facebook.com.”

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With the imminent exhaustion of IPv4 address space and the U.S. government’s renewed push to implement IPv6, the protocol has been getting more press lately.  The government’s mandate requires Federal government agencies to implement IPv6 on external-facing resources by early next year.  That got me to thinking about what that means to DNS.

Clearly, the mandate—assuming I read it correctly, which may not be such a good assumption—would require Federal government agencies to set up name servers with IPv6 addresses (and the corresponding AAAA records), either by adding IPv6 addresses to existing name servers or by setting up wholly new IPv6 name servers.

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