In Microsoft Windows operating systems, IPv4 addresses are valid location identifiers in Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) path names. However, the colon (;) is an illegal character in a UNC path name. Thus, the use of IPv6 addresses is also illegal in UNC names. For this reason, Microsoft implemented a transcription algorithm to represent an IPv6 address in the form of a domain name that can be used in UNC paths. For this purpose, Microsoft registered and reserved the second-level domain ipv6-literal.net on the Internet. IPv6 addresses are transcribed as a hostname or subdomain name within this name space, in the following fashion:

is written as 

This notation is automatically resolved by Microsoft software without any queries to DNS name servers. If the IPv6 address contains a zone index, it is appended to the address portion after an "s" character:

Example:

fe80--1s4.ipv6-literal.net

The correct UNC path for

is written as