GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages
github.com
github.com
This is extremely misleading at best. As far as I can tell from reading this stuff, the only thing that has changed recently is that github-repository-files.githubusercontent.com has started serving an AAAA record. (Perhaps other subdomains as well, but that’s the only one reported and it’s definitely not all.) That’s nothing to do with GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages has unofficially supported IPv6 for more than three years apart from the DNS records, so if you’re brave or foolish enough you could add AAAA records on a custom domain that’s handled by GitHub Pages.
Tangent here. Does anyone know why DNS record names are so terrible? Why are there records named after batteries?
I also call it "w w w" and not "dub dub dub" as some people do. Though I feel neither come up in conversation all that often.
(Many computers THINK they have IPv6 connectivity when they do NOT and so if they see an AAAA record and try to connect to it, it can cause a delay while that fails. Most browsers are better at this now (they will try to connect to both and show whichever answers faster), but not all network things are browsers.)
I have personally checked the result from my then-home connection (unfortunately, through he.net tunnel) and it worked, and it was properly logged by Apache. The CEO had native IPv6 on the phone, and it also worked for him, and, according to Apache logs, IPv6 was also used. I have also checked that the site was still accessible over IPv4. So I indeed don't know what went wrong.
On the other hand, I did not have access to Google webmaster console and had to trust the CEO that the SEO problem exists. It might have been a coincidence. And again, the SEO problem was in 2018, and is likely irrelevant today even if it really existed back then, that's why I said "in the past".
This is Comcast, so arguing with them doesn't get me anywhere, all I get is "Thanks for expressing your concern." "Rest assured that I will solve all your problems." from the support dude in some random call/chat center.
Happy Eyeballs isn't quite fully prevalent and it hasn't seen all failure modes yet nor how to deal with them.
Internets is a really hard problem. For starters: define "connected". My wife will sometimes suggest that our internet connection is not working - she implies that her laptop (Arch Linux - obvs) is completely broken. What is really happening is that Mr Zuckerberg's thang has wandered off for a break and a smoko.
This morning it was our mail server. Hit the wifi kill switch by accident then internet will not work.
I've disabled the kill switch.
With terminal apps I use as a developer, it's more of a crapshoot. curl and SSH work fine. I've seen others that don't.
Notably, Node.js's socket libraries can't fall back to IPv4 at all, even after the v6 connection times out. Node's DNS library actually overrides the default system behavior to prefer v4 over v6, probably for this reason. (This can be changed globally within a particular program, or on a per-lookup basis, but preferring v6 will allegedly become the default in an upcoming release.)
I've unfortunately had much experience with this due to major bugs in Comcast's modems.
I have FiOS as well and I'm only a few miles from them. I attempted to get IPV6 from the router settings and it didn't work for me.
Imagine if in 2001 some company tried to sell an "Internet service" that didn't provide IPv4, or only provided RFC1918 addresses, or didn't allow something as trivial as non-NAT routing of IPv4, even as an option. They'd be sued for false advertising, and rightly so.
Meanwhile, in 2021 tier-1 cloud providers like Azure have an absolute shitshow of partial IPv6 support, yet they get away with advertising that they provide "Internet connectivity". They provide only private ranges, and force NAT for all IPv6 traffic. The vast majority of their services are IPv4 only, so enabling IPv6 is mostly pointless. Worse, if you do enable IPv6 on their virtual networks, this then disables unrelated IPv4 functionality. It's madness.
so then they'll advertise "network connection service" or something instead of internet service. people are pretty willing to accept when marketing makes up new words to avoid regulation, as long as the they are still getting a product that meets their needs. if consumers don't care about ipv6, no amount of renaming things is going to change that.
if you really want to drive ipv6 adoption, find a way to get free porn on it.
I will echo that many Azure services don’t support v6 yet, though.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/ipv6-...
• ExpressRoute gateways CAN be used for IPv4-only traffic in a VNET with IPv6 enabled. Support for IPv6 traffic is on our roadmap.
• VPN gateways CANNOT be used in a VNET with IPv6 enabled, either directly or peered with "UseRemoteGateway".
• The Azure platform (AKS, etc.) does not support IPv6 communication for Containers.
• IPv6-only Virtual Machines or Virtual Machines Scale Sets are not supported, each NIC must include at least one IPv4 IP configuration.
• When adding IPv6 to existing IPv4 deployments, IPv6 ranges can not be added to a VNET with existing resource navigation links.
• Forward DNS for IPv6 is supported for Azure public DNS today but Reverse DNS is not yet supported.
That doesn't even being to cover it! There's all sorts of other fun limitations scattered all over the place, you'd have to spend weeks scraping them together into a pile of shame.
Examples include:
• The maximum prefix IPv6 prefix size available is just 16 addresses, which is hilariously tiny and totally negates the core benefit of IPv6's huge address space: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/publi...
• Forced NAT of IPv6, which entirely defeats the purpose and benefit of this protocol over IPv4.
• NAT doesn't interact with IPv6 address family. NAT can't be deployed on a subnet with an IPv6 prefix. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/nat-g...
• If you add an IPv6 address to a rule, [Azure] firewall fails. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/firewall/overview#kno...
• None of their PaaS services support IPv6 firewall rules. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40461803/allow-ipv6-addr...
Etc, etc, etc...
1) Further entrenches the big players by making it harder to enter the market.
2) Making decisions for companies with no understanding of the costs is a bad strategy. If it was easy to support they'd just do it.
3) It is still arguable if IPv6 is even necessary. I think yes, but the situation isn't clear enough to legislate. Maybe some better solution will be found when the pressure is on.
> Further entrenches the big players by making it harder to enter the market.
On the contrary, I think dual stack from the ground up is cheap. Big corps are reluctant to switch because it means paying the "interest" in their tech debt.
> Making decisions for companies with no understanding of the costs is a bad strategy. If it was easy to support they'd just do it.
Who said we don't understand the costs? You are underestimating the stringiness of the bean counters that got us into this coordination failure. You are also assuming the aggregate demand for abstract public goods like IPv6 availability could ever be sufficient in already-developed countries for market-based solutions to work.
> It is still arguable if IPv6 is even necessary. I think yes, but the situation isn't clear enough to legislate. Maybe some better solution will be found when the pressure is on.
IPv6 is necessary for a bunch of decentralization to work better. Thks isn't good for profits (no, "crypto" isn't the decentralization I have in mind), but it is good for society. This is clear to me, but the exact sort of abstract thing which is hard to put political weight behind.
I think we've been trying to make IPv6 happen since 1998, and ... it's not happening.
It's absolutely glacial, but IPv6 adoption has been steadily rising over the last 8 or so years. Unfortunately the increase has been linear rather than exponential.
That is, according to Google's stats of clients accessing their properties. Not a perfect snapshot of worldwide Internet users, but a pretty decent one. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
https://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/project.php?metric=p&timef...
If you use the linear model, growth is slower and the 100% will be reached by 2038.
I used to have a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel but I've abandoned mine as my small rural cable provider turned IPv6 on quietly (all you have to do is have your router ask for a /48).
> Q: Does $ISP support IPv6? > A: Yes! $ISP supports IPv6. For instructions on configuring your router….
I spent an hour trying and failing to get it working. Frustrated that I’d just invested so much time and not wanting it to be a total waste, I called customer service and, as you can imagine, I had an extremely difficult time trying to convince anyone that I didn’t need to turn my router off and on again.
Over the span of a few weeks, I tried calling twice and using their live chat once to ask about IPv6. At this point it was a matter of principle, if their website said they supported it I was going to hold them to it. Each time I communicated with them, I got a different answer as to why IPv6 wasn’t working: one person told me they do support it but not in my area, another person told me they don’t support it at all, and the third person told me that they did “offer” it but did not “support” it. Each time I read them the FAQ page entry which explicitly said they do support it with no conditions. By their responses, it was obvious that they thought I was a weirdo, but I just really wanted them to give me the IPv6 that they’d promised.
After all of this failed, I tried one last thing: I submitted a complaint with the FCC about misleading advertising. Before you call me a Karen, I wasn’t trying to get anyone in trouble or to get special treatment or whatever. I just wanted them to provide the services they promised. I specifically mentioned that I had nothing but positive experiences with the staff that I’d interacted with and that my issue was just a technical/marketing one. Well, whaddya know, I got a lovely email within 6 hours thanking me for bringing the issue to their attention, saying that they had identified a configuration issue in my local area, and that they had scheduled maintenance for the next day to fix it. And within 24 hours I (and presumably hundreds of my neighbors) had working IPv6!
Was it worth the time and effort? For IPv6, no. But for the satisfaction of getting a corporation to follow through with their word? Also, no. But for the ability to write this comment? Well, no. And I suspect this is how just about everyone who has ever spent more than an hour banging their head against a wall trying to get IPv6 working has felt in the end. Like, wow, I can now look at literally the same exact cat pictures as I did before but now I have access to 79 octillion times as many addresses, yay?
That’s my best guess as to why we’re still in the dark ages of 2^32 internet addresses.
Side note, their FAQ page has been changed to say “IPv6 is supported in most areas”. I’m at least proud to know I’m the reason for a few more weasel words on a corporate marketing website. Success.
The faster we can allow native IPv6 end-to-end, the faster we can get rid of the complex IPv4 compatibility technologies and simplify the entire internet. At some point, you may start to see networks with no v4 connectivity whatsoever (maybe they already exist, but I can't imagine them being useful), so this allows those users to reach github pages.
To directly answer your question, it's investment and maintenance in infrastructure, not for user features.
They are rare but do exist! Here's a couple of reports from the IPv6 subreddit: [1] [2].
[1]: https://teddit.net/r/ipv6/comments/he38ga/work_has_turned_of...
[2]: https://teddit.net/r/ipv6/comments/n5y5oo/update_on_not_bein...
For github pages its probably not going to make a huge difference but for things like SSH or file transfers it could be an issue. For things like video game servers or home servers you just flat out can not work them on v4 if your ISP uses CG-NAT.