ip6.int deprecated

[Doug Barton]

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Howdy,

RFC 4159 was published today, which officially deprecates ip6.int. You can 
find the full text at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4159.txt. Here is a 
relevant excerpt:

    In August 2001 the IETF published [RFC3152], which advised that the
    use of "ip6.int" as the domain for reverse-mapping of IPv6 addresses
    to DNS names was deprecated.  The document noted that the use of
    "ip6.int" would be phased out in an orderly fashion.

    As of 1 September 2005, the IETF advises the community that the DNS
    domain "ip6.int" should no longer be used to perform reverse mapping
    of IPv6 addresses to domain names, and that the domain "ip6.arpa"
    should be used henceforth, in accordance with the IANA Considerations
    described in [RFC3596].  The domain "ip6.int" is deprecated, and its
    use in IPv6 implementations that conform to the IPv6 Internet
    Standards is discontinued.

The one step I'm going to take directly to support this deprecation is to 
remove the ip6.int example from the sample named.conf file in the base. I'm 
sending this message to provide notice of that, and notice to the community 
generally that we should start moving in the direction of deprecating 
ip6.int wherever it might be found.

For those not aware of the history, ip6.int was the first stab at creating a 
reverse DNS zone for IP version 6. Eventually, the "issues" surrounding this 
topic were sorted out, and it was agreed to do reverse DNS in IPv6 in .arpa 
instead. Unfortunately, that left a lot of early adopters in a difficult 
position, and so the various players in the game (ICANN, the Regional 
Internet Registries, etc.) have been supporting both zones since 2001. In 
order to reduce the workload associated with this issue, and in order to 
encourage complete migration to ip6.arpa before wide deployment of IPv6 (and 
I'm sure for a lot of other reasons), the decision was made to officially 
deprecate ip6.int from the IETF perspective.

Other than some old references in src/contrib/bind9, the only place I see a 
reference to ip6.int in our base is in the named.conf file that I mentioned 
above. I hope that this note is useful however as a more general source of 
information, and of course if there is anything I've missed, I welcome 
others to take appropriate action.

Regards,

Doug

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