AAAA Record AAAA Record


What is an AAAA record?


DNS records are used to control the location of a resource on the Internet. AAAA records are similar to A records and are used to point a domain or subdomain to an IPv6 address. For example, if you query the AAAA records of google.com, it currently returns an IPv6 address of 2607:f8b0:400a:800::200e. 2607:f8b0:400a:800::200e is the IPv6 address of the hosting server for Google's website.

Not all websites use AAAA records. But it is more and more common for a website to have an AAAA record as IPv6 protocol becomes more and more popular due to IPv4 address exhaustion.

AAAA record format


A typical AAAA record looks like the following in standard BIND format: 

$ORIGIN example.com.
@ 3600 IN AAAA 2007:f8b0:400a:800b::200e 
* 3600 IN AAAA 2602:ff13:0:8888::224 
ftp 86400 IN AAAA 2001:470:1f18:2bf::201
An anatomy of the AAAA Record @ 3600 IN AAAA 2007:f8b0:400a:800b::200e looks like the below:
Host Label TTL Record Class Record Type Record Data
example.com. 3600 IN AAAA 2007:f8b0:400a:800b::200e
Host Label
The host label defines the hostname of a record and whether the hostname will be appended to the label. Fully qualified hostnames terminated by a period will not append the origin.

TTL
The time-to-live in seconds. This is the amount of time the record is allowed to be cached by an outside DNS server.

Record Class
Mainly 3 classes of DNS records exist:
  • IN (Internet) – default and generally what internet uses.
  • CH (Chaosnet) – used for querying DNS server versions.
  • HS (Hesiod) – uses DNS functionality to provide access to databases of information that change infrequently.

Record Type
The record format is defined using this field. Common record types are A, AAAA, CNAME, CAA, TXT etc.

Record Data
The data within a DNS answer. For an AAAA record, the record data contains an IPv6 address. Different record types will contain different types of record data.

How to add an AAAA record?


For instructions on how to add an AAAA record with us, you may refer to the tutorial here.

AAAA record glossary


AAAA Record
Maps hostnames to an IPv6 address. For example, the AAAA record for google.com points the IP address 607:f8b0:400a:800::200e.

IP Address
IP address stands for Internet Protocol Address and it is a numerical address assigned to computers and servers on the Internet. There currently are two popular versions of Internet Protocol: IPv4 and IPv6. An A record contains only IPv4 address information. AAAA records deal with IPv6 address information.

IPv4/IPv6 Address
There currently are two versions of Internet Protocol, IPv4 and IPv6. IPv4 addresses are usually represented in dot-decimal notation, consisting of four decimal numbers, each ranging from 0 to 255, separated by dots, 200.123.12.45 is an example of IPv4 address. As IPv4 has a limited capacity of IP addresses, the world has run out of unallocated IPv4 addresses. A new version of IP (IPv6), using 128 bits for the IP address, is deemed sufficient for the foreseeable future. An example of IPv6 is 2001:4670:ff28::1036.

IPv4 address exhaustion
IPv4 address exhaustion is the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses due to the limited number (4.3 billion) of IPv4 addresses. The exhaustion was foreseen since the 1980s and came to truth a few years ago. Currently, IPv4 and IPv6 coexist on the Internet.

BIND
Berkeley Internet Name Daemon - is the most commonly used DNS software on the Internet and Dynu observes BIND format.

DNS
The Domain Name System (DNS) is the phone book of the Internet. People access information online through easy-to-remember domain names. Computers communicate through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load Internet resources.

Dynamic DNS
A method of mapping a static hostname to a dynamic IP address automatically. A computer software or router built-in software is needed to achieve this.
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