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GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

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Re: GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

#31

Post by profmonocle »

jrockway wrote: post #27
remram wrote: post #10

I'm surprised they didn't have it until now. Every cloud provider's load balancer and CDN has had IPv6 for a while. That they don't have it for the site or SSH is less surprising, but GitHub Pages is static content.

Maybe AWS, Azure, and GCP, but not places like Digital Ocean. IPv6 is still very niche, and it's suffering from that effect where it being very niche keeps it very niche. Nobody wants to be an early adopter (and momentum seems to be dying), and the result is that there's no adoption. I think we've been trying to make IPv6 happen since 1998, and ... it's not happening.

> 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

Re: GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

#32

Post by profmonocle »

miyuru wrote: post #7
dheera wrote: post #5

Too bad I often have to disable IPv6 because my ISP suddenly decides to stop routing it from time to time. 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.

Doesn't Happy Eyeballs fallback to IPv4 on that situation?

Depends. Anecdotal evidence: Most "normal user" software handles it fine. (Chrome and Apple Mail on my Mac, Android apps, etc.)

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.

Re: GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

#33

Post by Gigachad »

toast0 wrote: post #30
jrockway wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A means address. The IPv6 variant is called AAAA because IPv6 addresses are 4x longer than IPv4 addresses.

Also, A6 is probably a better name, but it has a worse (unworkable?) format, so AAAA is a reasonable second choice.

It's not that hard to say anyway. You read it as "quad a".

Re: GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

#34

Post by Gigachad »

profmonocle wrote: post #31
jrockway wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe AWS, Azure, and GCP, but not places like Digital Ocean. IPv6 is still very niche, and it's suffering from that effect where it being very niche keeps it very niche. Nobody wants to be an early adopter (and momentum seems to be dying), and the result is that there's no adoption. I think we've been trying to make IPv6 happen since 1998, and ... it's not happening.

> 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

Even a linear growth is fine. By 2030 there will be pretty much 100% adoption at this pace. There may even be a tipping point when places like India are so stretched for v4 addresses and v6 is so widespread where local sites go v6 only which triggers a much faster adoption rate on the consumer side.

Re: GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

#35

Post by Gigachad »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #6

Silly question (especially for this forum): how would ipv6 be useful for websites served via Github Pages?

It's nothing critical but some ISPs use multiple layers of hacks to work IPv4 and certain types of networking become very unreliable over it. Things like long running connections will be dropped because the ISP routers do not maintain the NAT mapping forever.

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.

Re: GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

#36

Post by notatoad »

jiggawatts wrote: post #23
Ericson2314 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice to see this forced by law.

It should be as simple as not being allowed to advertise a service as providing Internet unless it provides 100% native, full-featured IPv6. 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,…

>as simple as not being allowed to advertise a service as providing Internet

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.

Re: GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

#38

Post by e-master »

Apologies for the silly question, but what’s so difficult in adopting v6? Cloud providers spend billions on new hardware every year, I’m honestly surprised at reading that some of them don’t fully support it yet? Is there some specific technical issue preventing them from mass adoption?

Re: GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

#39

Post by est31 »

Gigachad wrote: post #34
profmonocle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Even a linear growth is fine. By 2030 there will be pretty much 100% adoption at this pace. There may even be a tipping point when places like India are so stretched for v4 addresses and v6 is so widespread where local sites go v6 only which triggers a much faster adoption rate on the consumer side.

This website says that the 100% will be reached by 2030, but only if you use the quadratic model:

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.

Re: GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

#40

Post by roenxi »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #19
brirec wrote: post #16

It would be nice if Verizon was interested in providing IPv6 access via their Fios service at all in 2021.

It would be nice to see this forced by law.

That is a bad idea.

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.

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