GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

> 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.

(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 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).

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".