[ IANA | RFC 1918 | RFC 6304 (oboslete) | RFC 6305 | RFC 7534 | RFC 7535 | RootOps | AS112 Ops listing ]
NEWS: New zone home.arpa has been delegated to AS112 servers effective March 14, 2018.
NEWS: RFC 7534, which obsoletes RFC 6304, was published by the IETF in May of 2015. Operators are strongly advised to review changes to AS112 operations, specifically around IPv6.
NEWS: RFC 7535, describes a method to delegate additional zones to the AS112 project without the requirement for AS112 operators to manually synchronise their configurations. This is done through DNAME. It describes the use of two additional prefixes to advertise this component of the AS112 service. The IANA and ICANN have not yet implemented this feature as it requires changes to the root zone. Until the impact has been studied, there are currently no plans to do this.
Many private and some public networks generate PTR (reverse lookup) queries for RFC 1918 addresses, dynamic DNS updates and other ambiguous addresses, such as the ones below:
10.0.0.0/8
172.16.0.0/12
169.254.0.0/16
192.168.0.0/16
Through the IETF process, other delegations may be made periodically to the AS112 servers for other private or special use purposes, such as the one below:
home.arpa
This happens because many of the same people running those networks neglect to run a DNS server of their own, or worse, simply don't enumerate their IP address use in both forward and reverse DNS zones. This creates many queries which are ultimately sent up to the root DNS server system which in turn responds with negative answers. So what? The problem is the load this creates on the overall global DNS system: As more devices with private addresses connect to the Internet, the higher the load becomes without properly administered DNS servers for those devices.
There are now separate (non-root) servers for answering these queries on behalf of the global DNS system, described in an operator's listing here.
As a way to distribute the load across the Internet for RFC1918-related queries, we use IPv4 and IPv6 addresses as anycast addresses. The address blocks are 192.175.48.0/24 and 2620:4f:8000::/48 and its origin AS is 112. These address blocks are advertised from multiple points around the Internet, and these distributed servers coordinate their responses back to networks making those requests. These servers also co-ordinate back-end statistical analyses.
The people who run these anycast AS112 DNS servers are known as the AS112 Operators. They operate these servers using a constellation of anycast DNS servers using a certain set of well-known addresses. The operations are described in greater detail through IETF RFC 7534 and RFC 6305.
A mailing list for AS112 operators is open. For subscription information, please visit the list website and follow the instructions.
Finally there are several important references which should be consulted by current and prospective AS112 operators and others with an interest in general subjects on AS112 and anycast DNS operations.