IN-ADDR.ARPA Transition

This is the final update for the IN-ADDR.ARPA transition work.

The IN-ADDR.ARPA DNSSEC Delegation Signer record has been added to the ARPA zone.

This action now extends the DNSSEC validation chain to the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone.

No further updates will be posted to this project web site.

A note of thanks is extended to all the people and entities involved in this work: ARIN for their co-operation in the transition and for acting as the technical administrator of the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone, the operators of the 12 root-servers who carried the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone for many years, and the RIRs (RIPE-NCC, ARIN, LACNIC, APNIC, and AfriNIC) for taking on the role of operating the RFC5855 nameservers.

This is the sixth of a number of updates regarding the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone.

As of 2011-03-07 23:58 UTC all of the 12 root servers which were serving the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone had stopped doing so as described by ‘Planned IN-ADDR.ARPA Nameserver Change’.

The nameserver set now serving IN-ADDR.ARPA is, as described by RFC 5855:

A.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by ARIN)
B.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by ICANN)
C.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by AfriNIC)
D.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by LACNIC)
E.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by APNIC)
F.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by RIPE NCC)

One further update will be posted here in the coming days regarding the addition of the DS record for IN-ADDR.ARPA to the parent zone.

This is a courtesy notification of an upcoming change to the
nameserver set for the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone.

There is no expected impact on the functional operation of the DNS
due to this change.

There are no actions required by DNS server operators or end users.

DETAIL

The IN-ADDR.ARPA zone is used to provide reverse mapping (number
to name) for IPv4. The servers which currently provide authoritative
DNS service for the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone are as follows:

A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
D.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
H.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
K.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

On Wednesday 2010-02-16 processing will begin to change the nameserver
set to the following, as described in RFC 5855:

A.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by ARIN)
B.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by ICANN)
C.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by AfriNIC)
D.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by LACNIC)
E.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by APNIC)
F.IN-ADDR-SERVERS.ARPA (operated by RIPE NCC)

The usual IANA process for a change in the ARPA zone involves a
series of technical checks and the gathering of various authorisations,
and may take several days to complete.

Following this, the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone will be dropped from root
servers in two groups:

1. Week of 2011-02-21 — 2011-02-25

B, C, E, G, I, M

2. Week of 2011-02-28 — 2011-03-11

A, D, F, H, K, L

Individual root server operators will choose a time for the maintenance
within their respective window and follow their usual procedures
to carry out the change.

RFC 5855 “Nameservers for IPv4 and IPv6 Reverse Zones” specifies a dedicated and stable set of nameserver names for each of the IN-ADDR.ARPA and IP6.ARPA zones.

Currently IN-ADDR.ARPA is served by a subset of the DNS root servers.

This exercise of delegating a reverse zone to a stable set of names has already been undertaken and completed for IP6.ARPA.

At present, the authoritative set of name servers which serve IN-ADDR.ARPA are:

(in no particular order)

This represents 12 of the 13 root-servers.

The IN-ADDR.ARPA zone is a critical service for Internet operations as it provides a guaranteed method to perform host address to host name mapping. The delegations which exist in this zone represent the ‘/8’ IPv4 delegations to the registrants of the corresponding IANA function allocations to legacy registrants and Regional Internet Registries. Since 1997 ARIN has performed technical management function of zone editor and zone generator as inherited from InterNIC.

The IN-ADDR.ARPA zone is a sub domain of the ARPA top-level domain. ARPA sub domain management principles, management guidelines and operational requirements are described in RFC 3172.