[HN Gopher] Enabling IPv6 Support for GitHub Pages
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Enabling IPv6 Support for GitHub Pages
Author : Zdh4DYsGvdjJ
Score : 77 points
Date : 2021-09-30 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.blog)
| curiousmindz wrote:
| 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?
| api wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Give it another 20 years...
|
| https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
| nsoxo wrote:
| Why change something that works?
| supertrope wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Because you want to use something better?
| josephcsible wrote:
| Because we're running out of IPv4 addresses, and in a lot of
| cases, NAT doesn't work.
| curiousmindz wrote:
| 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...
| mattashii wrote:
| 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
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Years ago, the French ISP `Free`, after much dragging of
| feet, enabled IPv6 support for their customers._
|
| And quite a quick deployment AFAICT:
|
| > _Free deployed the IPv6 infrastructure in only 5 weeks,
| from 7 November to 11 December 2007, thanks to an
| innovative 6rd (IPv6 rapid deployment) proposal by Remi
| Despres.[44]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_(ISP)#Internet_access
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_rapid_deployment
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.
|
| ----
|
| 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.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _Also, damn every ISP and every router company that doesn
| 't 100% support IPv6._
|
| It's extra development and extra testing (in fact it's way
| more testing due to the combinatorial explosion of IPv4/IPv6
| interface schemes).
|
| That comes at a cost.
|
| > _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._
|
| ISPs & endpoint devices are the majority of the Internet, as
| far as complexity is concerned. Upgrading the equipment for
| HW-acceleration of IPv6 (parity with IPv4) is very costly.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That complexity is also part of why the Linux kernel's built-
| in support for IP autoconfig at boot time for network-based
| root filesystems (without using a userspace DHCP client) only
| supports IPv4.
| mercora wrote:
| > 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.
|
| there is RDNSS for router advertisments used with slaac.
| although it wasnt there initially and support for it might be
| lacking yet.
| josephcsible wrote:
| How important is it for networks to provide DNS servers?
| Couldn't a device usually get away with just using
| 2606:4700:4700::1111 or 2001:4860:4860::8888 all the time
| with SLAAC? Also, what about RDNSS?
| supertrope wrote:
| DNS is even more crucial with v6.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| So, I was less aware of RDNSS. That makes one of my
| complaints moot.
|
| DNS is critical. I'm not talking about registering an
| endpoint into a local DNS server (mydesktop.local), I'm
| talking about the endpoint knowing who to ask about
| google.com.
| josephcsible wrote:
| I know DNS itself is critical. I'm asking whether
| _network-provided_ DNS is critical, or if using well-
| known DNS servers like Google 's or Cloudflare's would be
| good enough on most networks.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| As of a few years ago you don't need DHCPv6 to announce DNS
| servers.
|
| Router advertisements can announce a recursive DNS server
| (RDNSS) which local clients might like to use, eg:
|
| https://github.com/radvd-
| project/radvd/blob/master/radvd.con...
|
| Bad luck though if you are using, ahem, AIX or Windows Phone:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_IPv6_support_i.
| ..
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _It boggles my mind that IPv6 has such a slow roll out (it 's
| been a thing since the early 2000s = twenty years ago)._
|
| IPv4 had just as slow a roll out in some ways. TCP/IP had its
| flag day in 1983:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_day_(computing)
|
| There was early commercialization of the Internet around
| +-1990, but it didn't really start taking off until around
| 1994:
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercialization_of_the_Inter...
|
| The Dot-com bubble peaked in 2000:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
|
| RFC 1918 was published in 1996, and the kludge of NAPT was
| documented in RFC 2663 in 1999.
|
| Given all of the above, I would say it took IPv4 about 15 years
| to reach the mainstream.
| zokier wrote:
| I think its more of a matter of perception than anything. IPv6
| adoption has gone pretty smoothly imho, there hasn't been any
| major blowbacks or anything; for example the Google IPv6
| adoption chart trend is steadily increasing.
|
| Another thing you can see from Google IPv6 charts that before
| 2011 IPv6 adoption was near zero. This matches pretty well with
| IPv4 exhaustion; IANA pool was exhausted in 2011, and APNIC
| followed later that year. Before that anyone could get IPv4
| address pretty liberally, so there was very little reason to
| think about IPv6. Especially in western world (RIPE/ARIN) where
| consumption was slower than e.g. APNIC; notably ARIN reached
| exhaustion only in 2015.
|
| https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
|
| In summary, I feel that having third of internet become ipv6 in
| about a decade seems pretty decent result, considering how
| complex and especially diverse internet is.
| mabbo wrote:
| 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 less than a year until we run out of IPs."
| (I'm badly quoting a brilliant person many years after the
| fact, but that's roughly my memory of the talk she gave.)
|
| Major tech companies often have constraints like that which the
| rest of us wouldn't even imagine.
| jauer wrote:
| 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.or
| g/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 companies as they grappled with these issues.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I don't know how long ago that was, but I kinda have to call
| bullshit on her claim (even if it was hyperbole for the sake
| of making a point). Companies exist to make bespoke solutions
| for this very purpose, and nowadays outsourcing that kind of
| work is just natural for Amazon. Hell, they made a deal with
| Rivian to get a fleet of electric delivery trucks, getting
| some Chinese manufacturer to slap a Cortex m53 into a shitty
| plastic enclosure with Ethernet ports can't be that
| difficult. I bet there are AmazonBasics products that have
| required more forethought than that.
| mabbo wrote:
| It could very well be.
|
| But how many of those routers could they make, and how
| quickly? And for how much? And could they really handle the
| kind of load that Amazon needed to handle? And how quickly
| could these bespoke solutions be installed, tested at
| scale, verified to work? Would the manufacturer provide
| support if they don't work as expected?
|
| The solution that was done was to split the network into
| sub-networks with just the few proxy gateways between them
| that were needed. And it worked- I think it's still working
| that way. That's not free to do (every service owner had to
| do some networking work), but it's also perhaps less
| expensive than switching out all the hardware, overall.
|
| And rest assured, Amazon always chooses the option that
| maximizes profit in the long run. Other than that stupid
| phone.
| mike_d wrote:
| A core or edge router in a terabit+ scale network is a far
| cry from getting someone in China to make you a bunch of
| Netgear clones.
|
| The Cisco 5500 series chassis is about 21 rack units (or
| about 3 feet) tall to give you an idea of the scale of
| these devices in the real world.
| pdmccormick wrote:
| That is a pleasantly concise announcement.
| kaliszad wrote:
| We have created perhaps an easier documentation on how to make it
| all work on your own domain, with many screenshots and such. Here
| it is: https://www.orgpad.com/s/cjzpkTRIK_L
| zokier wrote:
| 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% IPv6. UK, Finland, Belgium, and
| Netherlands on the other hand seem to be having better IPv6
| adoption than FTTx.
|
| 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.
| an_d_rew wrote:
| Thank 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!
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| I don't really understand the benefits, would you mind
| explaining them to me ?
| metalliqaz wrote:
| 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.
| voiper1 wrote:
| >Rather than hide whole blocks of users behind NAT,
|
| ... which creates all sorts of routing issues.
|
| If you don't have your own publicly accessible IP address
| it creates all sorts of connection issues.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| for some use cases. for example, most home users are
| behind ipv4 NAT because of their wifi routers. nobody
| really notices a problem.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| Mostly because we've invested huge amounts of engineering
| effort to work around the problems. The result is that
| for the most common use cases, things mostly work.
|
| NAT systems are optimized for a few devices to be active
| at a time. As the number grows they might not co-operate
| well. Game consoles are infamous for networking problems
| when you have anything other than a single machine.
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(page generated 2021-09-30 23:00 UTC)