June 8, 2012 archive

Jun 08

Site Changes – And Returning To The Regular Mix of DNSSEC / IPv6 Postings

As you may have noticed, for the past three weeks our blog and our accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ have all been pretty much “All IPv6, All The Time!” We joined with our colleagues to focus on what turned out to be the massively successful World IPv6 Launch and so we’ve been extremely focused on that event.

With IPv6 now launched, we’ll be turning our attention back to how we can enable more people to successfully deploy IPv6… and we’ll be bringing DNSSEC back into focus!  So you can expect to see us returning to our usual mix of covering both IPv6 and DNSSEC on our blog and in our social media accounts.

While we have your attention, there’s two minor temporary changes to the site that we’ll note:

1. IPv6 Detector removed from front page – Ever since we’ve launched the site we’ve had this fun widget on the front page that showed whether you were connecting to the site using IPv4 or IPv6.  Unfortunately, in the run up to World IPv6 Launch there was concern about how our web sites would withstand the expected load and so some caching technology was introduced into our infrastructure.  Sadly, the caching servers interfere with that widget and so everyone was showing up connecting via IPv6 (don’t we wish!) and with an address of “::1″.  So until we can sort out the issue we’ve removed the widget from the front page.  Hopefully we’ll be able to get that back soon.

2. Facebook and Twitter signin for comments removed – We’ve been getting a lot of blog comment spam that was not being caught by the Akismet spam filter we’ve been using.  After noticing that it was all coming from supposed Facebook logins, we removed the ability to login via Twitter or Facebook to leave a comment to see if that will reduce the comment spam (and it seems to have done so).  So we need to figure out what’s going on there before we re-enable that capability. You can still leave comments… you just have to type in your name, email address, etc.

That’s the news for the moment. Thank you again for all the incredible feedback and support you’ve given us!

Jun 08

aaaa-check – a small little program to check for IPv6 DNS records (AAAA)

As I was helping out last week approving website participants for World IPv6 Launch, I found that sometimes I wanted to check for the existence of a AAAA record to know if the domain was already running IPv6.  I was using the good old “dig” command for a while, but wanted an easier way to do it. I looked around for a tool that would do what I wanted… and when I couldn’t find one I dusted the cobwebs in my brain off of my python coding and wrote up a little app in python:

https://github.com/danyork/aaaa-check

It also gave me an excuse to play with the dnspython library developed by Bob Halley (and also available on Github). Once you follow my installation instructions and make the file executable (or call it with “python” first), it just lets you enter in domain names and it will tell you if there is a quad-A or not:

$ ./aaaa-check.py
Domain name = www.internetsociety.org
2001:41c8:20::29
Domain name = www.google.com
2607:f8b0:4002:802::1011
Domain name = www.facebook.com
2a03:2880:10:1f02:face:b00c::25
Domain name = www.wikipedia.org
2620:0:861:ed1a::1
Domain name = www.cnn.com
No AAAA
Domain name = www.youtube.com
2001:4860:800a::5b
Domain name = www.yahoo.com
2001:4998:f00b:1fe::3001
Domain name = ^C
Goodbye!
$

I didn’t do anything fancy for commands… you just press Ctrl+C to exit.

What I was then doing was copying the domain name from the World IPv6 Launch web page and pasting it into the command window where I was running the app.

It worked well for what I needed… I probably won’t do too much more with it, although I might add on the capability for it to read a flat file from the command line, so you could just do “aaaa-python <filename>” and have it run through a list and tell you which domains have AAAA records.

Anyway… it’s out there and if any of you find it of interest please feel free to play with it.  And if you feel like extending it in some way, feel free to send some patches (or if you are on Github, just fork it and then send me a pull request).