Start-up InfoWeapons is selling what it claims are the first domain name system appliances to support both IPv4 and IPv6 running in dual-stack mode.

IPv4 is the Internet’s main communications protocol, while IPv6 is a long-anticipated upgrade to that protocol.

InfoWeapons says it has sold several of its SolidDNS appliances, which became available in June, to Asian telecom carriers and the U.S. military.

IPv6 promises easier administration, tighter security and an advanced addressing scheme over IPv4. IPv6 uses a 128-bit addressing scheme, which allows for a virtually limitless number of uniquely identified systems to be connected directly to the Internet. IPv4 uses a 32-bit addressing scheme and supports only a few billion systems. Developed 10 years ago by the Internet Engineering Task Force, IPv6 is just starting to be deployed by carriers and enterprises.

The SolidDNS appliances run on a secure version of the open source BSD operating system that InfoWeapons developed and dubbed SolidBSD. The appliances use certificate-based authentication for communications between the DNS server and the network administrator. They also feature built-in dual stack firewalls.

"It’s absolutely critical for IPv6, even more so than with IPv4, to have secure DNS,’’ says Lawrence Hughes, founder and CTO of InfoWeapons. "The whole IPv6 architecture is dependent on DNS being secure, reliable and easy to manage.’’

SolidDNS appliances provide instant prefix renumbering, a feature that is particularly useful for IPv6. This feature lets network managers quickly update the 64-bit prefixes that they get from their ISPs. This is a process that can take several weeks to do manually. Network managers need to change prefixes when they change ISPs or when they configure network equipment in one location and ship it somewhere else.

SolidDNS appliances also support Enum, an emerging protocol used in VoIP systems to convert telephone numbers to IP addresses. And the devices automatically generate reverse zone files for DNS, which can be tricky to do manually.

"Configuration files, root fixes and zone files – they are all automatically generated, and we guarantee them to be perfect,’’ Hughes says. "With IPv6, the complexity of doing zone files, both forward and reverse zones, are going to be much harder than with IPv4.’’