Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
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Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
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Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
#2Thank you!
I know it’s all the rage to say “gee why no v6 yet?”, but that’s a LOT of infrastructure and testing to overhaul…
The effort is much appreciated!
Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
#3It 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?
Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
#4It 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?
Two reasons. First, it's just inertia and backward compatibility. Same reason we still use the x86 instruction set in spite of its issues. Second reason is that long IPs really are kind of inconvenient for IT and network administrator people.
Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
#5It 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?
Why change something that works?
Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
#6Thank you! I know it’s all the rage to say “gee why no v6 yet?”, but that’s a LOT of infrastructure and testing to overhaul… The effort is much appreciated!
I don’t really understand the benefits, would you mind explaining them to me ?
Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
#7It 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?
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 routing hardware, making it very resource-intensive (much more so than IPv4), resulting in low throughput.
... based on personal research in ~2015-2016
Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
#8It 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 DHCP) - but didn't enable routers to provide DNS information.
Therefore, in any useful deployment, you need to deal with SLAAC for IP allocation, and DHCPv6 for DNS information.
Outside of that, the spec is pretty decent.
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Also, damn every ISP and every router company that doesn't 100% support IPv6. Shockingly, this includes Ubiquiti, which is "supposed" to be medium-enterprise grade.
ISPs and endpoint network devices are the only reason we don't have IPv6 more prevalent, combined with NAT, CGNAT etc. being good enough to keep the net hobbling along.
Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
#9Thank you! I know it’s all the rage to say “gee why no v6 yet?”, but that’s a LOT of infrastructure and testing to overhaul… The effort is much appreciated!
I don’t really understand the benefits, would you mind explaining them to me ?
the Internet is almost out of IPv4 addresses, and the ones that are left are becoming expensive to obtain. Rather than hide whole blocks of users behind NAT, they can just use IPv6.
Re: Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
#10It 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?
Why change something that works?
HTTP/1.1 also "works", yet we are moving to v2 (edit: more smoothly).
Same for many other (low level) techs.
But maybe IPv6 is so low level that it has a lot more inertia...