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Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

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Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#102
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

India's visible adoption stats are over-represented by lte deployment. Lots of broadband providers still don't have ipv6 and some major ones deployed it very recently.

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#103
post #30

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 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…

Which router produced in the last 10 years does not support IPv6?

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#104
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why change something that works?

Video chat. File transfers without a third party host. Cell phones almost always only offer a public address over v6. Internet gaming. VPNs without address conflicts. Not being banned from Wikipedia because someone else with the same CGNAT ISP got banned.

For the average consumer they don't notice a difference. Both my home and mobile ISPs have said they have no plans to offer IPv6 connectivity because it's not a requirement.

Users don't care, and until a lot of them do ISPs won't do anything.

People can still video chat, play games and use VPNs without v6.

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#105
post #28

One interesting observation about IPv6 I've made is that in Europe IPv6 and FTTx seem inversely correlated. For example Spain is one of the leaders in FTTx with 87% of homes covered, but have only 3% IPv6 adoption according to Google. Meanwhile Germany has one of the highest IPv6 adoptions in Europe, 52%, and one of the lowest FTTx coverages (16%). Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Iceland all have 90% FTTx and 10% IPv…

> My guess is that ISPs must have needed to choose if to invest to core network or to last mile, and that is visible here. But at the same time it seems bit weird that you'd in 2020s deploy fancy new fiber networks without IPv6.

Well there's no real value connecting to an IPv6 island. The Internet is still IPv4.

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really understand the benefits, would you mind explaining them to me ?

> I don’t really understand the benefits, would you mind explaining them to me ? 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: * https://auctions.ipv4.global * https://ipv4marketgroup.com/ipv4-pricing/ * https://ipv4connect.com/marketplace Or get an IP…

You'd still need IPv4 to connect with the Internet.

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#107
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…

Which router produced in the last 10 years does not support IPv6?

Cisco still produces brand new equipment without IPv6 support. It's not only routers, much of the rest of the networking stack needs IPv6 to be enabled as well.

We mistakenly had the same notion that "why would a new line of Cisco wireless equipment not have IPv6". That pushed back a network upgrade of a remote office a few months. Our mistake really, we should have checked.

Of manufacturers, like Kyocera, have equipment that technically supports IPv6, but no-one really knows who to configure it. IBM have a software product which is IPv6 capable, or it was when they did the initial implementation in 2012. Later versions just sort of shipped with broken IPv6, because IBM doesn't actually test in new releases.

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#108
post #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 suppose…

Having implemented SLAAC and address anonymization:

These are very, very simple protocols.

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#109
post #28

One interesting observation about IPv6 I've made is that in Europe IPv6 and FTTx seem inversely correlated. For example Spain is one of the leaders in FTTx with 87% of homes covered, but have only 3% IPv6 adoption according to Google. Meanwhile Germany has one of the highest IPv6 adoptions in Europe, 52%, and one of the lowest FTTx coverages (16%). Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Iceland all have 90% FTTx and 10% IPv…

I wouldn't count it like that. Germany's top provider Deutsche Telekom has a market share of around 40% and has enabled IPv6. Vodafone as well.

Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages

#110

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?

Having done some work on implementation/migration:

EVERYTHING needs to work.

There's a hell of a lot of software (and, even worse, hardware) that encodes assumptions about IPv4. Everything from userspace asking specifically parsing only IPv4 addresses, to only listening for IPv4 incoming connections, to variables using the IPv4-only type, &c. And let's not even start on the L3 hardware acceleration built into so much networking equipment.

You can't flip the switch when 75% of the stuff on your device is ready. The remaining 25% will break, badly. You need to switch over every single piece of code. And then before you get any benefit out of it, you need to do the same on every remote system you want to talk to.

This is the magic and the terror of internetworking. Before IP, you had to go through this nightmare for changes at many different layers of the stack. With the clean-ish separation of IP, only one layer was make-or-break like this: layer 3. Any change to layer 3 is horrifically difficult, purely as a deployment/management challenge.

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