IPv6 Endpoint for Main Load Balancer

Hello,

I currently use Netlify with my own domain with DNS hosted on DNS Made Easy (Primary) and Hurricane Electric (Secondary with AFXR). DNS Made Easy has what they call as “ANAME” or alias records which I use on my apex domain, but they only support generating IPv4 A records from ANAMEs. I have just contacted their support and they say that IPv6 alias records is still under development, and they only plan to release this feature to Constellix, which is their usage-based anycast DNS service. So as a workaround, I am wondering if I can add a static IPv6 AAAA record to my apex domain, so it can be accessible from pure IPv6 hosts? I have checked the documentation, but only the IPv4 main load balancer address is published.

Sincerely

Hi there!

We do not yet have an ipv6 address for the load balancer, so that won’t be possible. Further, DNS Made Easy’s ANAME/ALIAS records are NOT usable with our service, as they ignore our TTL (which we set intentionally low to allow us to remove and update CDN nodes at will) and further they cache a response from one client in one location (say, Europe) and return the answer to another location that should get a different answer (say, Australia).

I’ve talked with their support team about this (2 years ago) and they have no desire to support our use case. So, don’t use the ANAME record.

I’ve added this thread to our open feature request for an ipv6 address for the load balancer so I can update it in case things change, and you’ll get a notification from our community at that time.

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So could you elaborate what needs to be supported by the DNS service provider in order for ALIAS on the root to work well? I am now considering switching Hurricane Electric as my parimary DNS host and DNS Made Easy as my secondary, but before doing that I would like to contact HE support about the support for ALIAS record TTL. However, I am not 100% sure what I should ask.

I have also noticed that I can set a TTL on my side for a given ANAME record. I wonder if this will be a workaround. I currently have it set to 900ms.

P.S. I am not sure how bad the impact of catching response for different locations would be, but my site is set up so that usually the apex just 302 redirects to the www subdomain.

There are a couple of DNS providers that works well with Netlify. This community post about DNS providers has a list that work well with our service. Perhaps one of those would be a viable option?

That said, redirecting your apex to your www subdomain within your DNS configuration could work, but it’s not a recommended configuration. Our system will do the redirecting for you given that your apex domain is pointing to Netlify using either an A record or ALIAS/ANAME (or CNAME with flattening) record.

EDIT: Add clarification on what I meant about redirecting to a www subdomain not being recommended.

I have no intention to switch for now as I have already paid my yearly subscription fee…

I’ve update my previous reply to clarify my last statement as I realized that it was a bit vague and could be misunderstood.

That said, let me know how it goes with your existing DNS provider.