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Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

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Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#71

It boggles my mind that IPv6 has such a slow roll out (it's been a thing since the early 2000s = twenty years ago). I would have thought that all the major tech companies supported it years ago on all their infrastructures, websites and apps. But there are still a lot of hold outs. What about IPv6 makes it such a chore to become widespread?

For me it's a few things that keep me from fully embracing it, & largely the problem is perception, as others have noted. 1. I'm a small-time self hoster. I need/want to control access to geographic locations and using IPv4 makes that pretty easy. Last time I checked, IPv6 was just so wrong that it's no good to use at all, and most IPv6 addresses were "unknown" in origin. 2. I'm used to the pseudo security that a NAT…

I've adopted IPv6 for a small business network I run and it's been great being able to punch small holes in the firewall for certain services without dealing with NAT, port conflicts for software that makes it hard to configure ports, etc. I have a bunch of services that I access there that are configured IPv6-only just because it's so much easier to configure than NAT.

2. MacOS and Windows use IPv6 Privacy Extensions to randomize your address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#Temporary_address...

3. They work great though, I always had weird MTU issues with IPv4 and had to hard-code one in my router, with IPv6 Path-MTU just works. It really annoys me when people turn off ping, stop doing that.

4. Poor UI for firewalls/routers that is not optimized for dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 is indeed a problem. And not just that, home or small business routers often have no IPv6 UI at all for stuff like firewall.

With IPv4 I always had trouble remember exactly what number was what device, with IPv6 it kind of forced my hand to set up DNS entries for everything and that short-term pain (what, 15 minutes?) paid back every time I had to connect to some printer I couldn't remember if it was .218 or .215

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#73
post #60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it took 15 years to build the entire Internet from scratch but it's taking over 20 years to upgrade to a new version.

It is a lot bigger now. I wonder how much IPv6 growth is net new hardware vs replacing old hardware

Easy, India vs USA stats show that. India had an internet boom after exhaustion so its adoption is new hardware. USA's boom predates IPv6 so its mostly replaced.

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#74
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's a few things that keep me from fully embracing it, & largely the problem is perception, as others have noted. 1. I'm a small-time self hoster. I need/want to control access to geographic locations and using IPv4 makes that pretty easy. Last time I checked, IPv6 was just so wrong that it's no good to use at all, and most IPv6 addresses were "unknown" in origin. 2. I'm used to the pseudo security that a NAT…

> I'm used to the pseudo security that a NAT gives. In consumer routers, port forwarding is the exact same thing as an inbound traffic firewall. But when I turn on IPv6, what is the equivalent? Is my printer still protected from random inbound internet traffic? On my Netgear R6700, I can't figure it out from the UI or from forum posts/help content. And without being certain, I don't want to turn on IPv6. Even though…

Home routers (and even small business routers from companies you'd expect better from like Ubiquiti) are often completely missing the UI for stuff like IPv6 firewall and it's a real tragedy and definitely something that is holding back adoption.

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was, at some point, routing. Not all (inter)continental data highways are/were IPv6-enabled, meaning that IPv6 does/did not have the performance of IPv4 (latency, bandwidth). Global websites with no global distribution of servers thus kept using IPv4-only to prevent significant performance regressions for the early adopter clients. Similarly, IPv6 hardware accelleration was not very common on consumer/prosumer rou…

Years ago, the French ISP `Free`, after much dragging of feet, enabled IPv6 support for their customers. Performance was abysmal, 2x-10x slower than IPv4. Turns out many of the routers out there can perform IPv4 table lookups in the data-plane (fast-path), but IPv6 is delegated to the control-plane (slow-path), for much slower performance.

The main fiber network here in Japan (NTT) had the opposite development - their old PPPoE-based IPv4 core network was under-dimensioned for modern traffic patterns, so instead of upgrading it they build the next generation core network on IPv6.

So the first troubleshooting step when someone complains their home internet is slow is to say "have you enabled IPv6 service?"

Switching from PPPoE to IPv4-over-IPv6 means you get switched to CGNAT so if you want to host anything it's a downgrade, but in reward you get far greater performance.

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#76
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dug into IPv6 a few weeks ago. If you learn it from the ground up, as if you were first learning IPv4, it truly is not more complicated than IPv4+ARP. Length of address may be a reason people don't look at it at first, but if you look at it from an engineering perspective, it makes sense. The only thing I don't like about it, is how they created SLAAC (a way for a client to auto-configure its own IP address without…

In what way doesn't Ubiquity sorry it? I'm using only Ubiquity gear at home, and my network is fully IPv6. My router is an Edgerouter by the way. I do recall seeing some of the configuration wizard stuff not having options for IPv6 in the past, but that's just for initial configuration anyway. Once you are done with that you do everything from the config tree anyway.

If you configure an EdgeRouter completely through the command line then yes it does support it. The web UI though, is completely missing things like IPv6 firewall if you just quickly want to add a rule with a few clicks.

On the Unifi gear, the IPv6 UI that is there is marked "beta"

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#77

It boggles my mind that IPv6 has such a slow roll out (it's been a thing since the early 2000s = twenty years ago). I would have thought that all the major tech companies supported it years ago on all their infrastructures, websites and apps. But there are still a lot of hold outs. What about IPv6 makes it such a chore to become widespread?

> What about IPv6 makes it such a chore to become widespread?

IPv6 is not just a straightforward extension of IPv4 to bigger addresses (plus some cleverness for how to route between them, if at all).

There's a whole lot of other complexity in the protocol. There's a way you're supposed to get addresses that's not DHCP, and a good chunk of clients don't have or only recently got a DHCPv6 implementation. You're supposed to have an efficient hardware multicast implementation. Addresses are structured (unlike IPv4 CIDR), and an entire /64 is supposed to be assigned to a single customer / subnet so they can auto-configure addresses based on that. In turn, the way to auto-configure your (NAT-less) IPv6 address was to use your MAC address, i.e., give advertisers a free permanent third-party cookie, and the RFC to do something else only came out in 2007.

And, of course, for better or worse people have designs that involve NAT, and until very recently IPv6 basically demanded that you rip all of it out.

Regardless of whether you think these changes are good or not, they are certainly a chore.

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#78
post #37
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall being at Amazon some years ago when we were running out of IP addresses internally. A natural answer was "Why don't we all just switch to IPv6?". The senior principle project manager in charge put it very simply: "The number of routers that don't support IPv6 that we'd need to replace exceeds the world-wide yearly production of IPv6 routers capable of replacing them. At our current rate of growth, we have le…

Facebook's answer was "fine, we'll build our own routers" (in the datacenter, which is where quantity comes in, and is now v6-only (with few exceptions): https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/cas... Major tech companies have constraints, but when they decide to move, they can move almost anything. It would be cool to see how constraints and problem solving approaches differed among the FANG compani…

Same answer at Google

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#79

It boggles my mind that IPv6 has such a slow roll out (it's been a thing since the early 2000s = twenty years ago). I would have thought that all the major tech companies supported it years ago on all their infrastructures, websites and apps. But there are still a lot of hold outs. What about IPv6 makes it such a chore to become widespread?

I dug into IPv6 a few weeks ago. If you learn it from the ground up, as if you were first learning IPv4, it truly is not more complicated than IPv4+ARP. Length of address may be a reason people don't look at it at first, but if you look at it from an engineering perspective, it makes sense. The only thing I don't like about it, is how they created SLAAC (a way for a client to auto-configure its own IP address without…

> Also, damn every ISP and every router company that doesn't 100% support IPv6.

Such as Verizon who still doesn't support it on FIOS

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#80
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why change something that works?

> Why change something that works? Because it does not work. Want to run a public service with end-to-end connectivity? Go to your RIR to request an IPv4 block and be put on a waiting list. Or break out your cheque book and be prepared to cough up $35+/IP for the privilege of global connectivity: * https://auctions.ipv4.global * https://ipv4marketgroup.com/ipv4-pricing/ * https://ipv4connect.com/marketplace

A friends company that was able to buy two /24s under $2K each and get them pretty quick.

When I signed up for a new data center internet connection, both my ISPs charged me something like $25/month for a /24.

IPv4 addresses are still relatively cheap to get.

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