There must be a reason why IPv6 DNS entries are named AAAA

@solene

Thats the sound of people dealing with ipv6

@solene I always thought it was because of the address size, IPv4 has 32 bits and IPv6 has 128 bits. If 32 bits is A, 128 bits is AAAA :D

@solene Because they’re four times longer than IPv4 A entries?

@solene at least CNAMEs aren't CNAMECNAMECNAMECNAME xD

@solene RFC 6563 gets you to RFC 1886 which gets you to draft-ietf-ipngwg-dns-00 but there is no explanation in there.

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/ipngwg/ seems incomplete. ​

@solene This may not be very helpful, but I vaguely recall that the original idea was to name them A6 RRs. I assume the WG ultimately converged on AAAA.

Turning the question back to you, what would you call them?

To my mind, the biggest question is why introduce two address RRs? Now every application on the planet needs to issue an A and an AAAA query.

But the AAAA design could have included the A details as well, sort of like an SRV RR and resulted in just a single query.

@imouthes @solene They ought to be CNAAAAME!

@imouthes

@markd it could have been separated by , or |

@solene Meanwhile IPv4 DNS entries :