Try the following:
$ nslookup github.com
[...]
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: github.com
Address: 140.82.121.3
See also the completely ignored post in their forums.
comment from the forum:
New ISPs in my country are IPv6-only because there is no new IPv4 space to be provided to them. They do have a over-shared IPv4 address by CGNAT but due to the oversharing, it is unstable and not rare to be offline. For these companies, the internet access is stable only in IPv6.
Thinking about the server-side, some cloud providers are making extra charges for IPv4 addresses (e.g.: Vultr.com) so most of the servers in my company are IPv6-only. Cloning github repositories is very cumbersome due to the lack of IPv6 support and this issue affects me and my team mates on a daily basis.
The math is simple: there are 4.88 billion internet users in the world but the IPv4 space only provides 4 billion addresses. It’s over: IPv4 is obsolete and is provided in a legacy mode. Current applications and services must be IPv6 enabled otherwise it should be seen as obsolete. For that matter, Github.com is an obsolete service because it relies on obsolete technology as IPv4.
Roasted
“IPv6 is not a feature; its absence is a bug”
- Someone on the Flathub repo, I think
I always use Github to check if my IPv4 DNS works lol (using
ping). So it’s definitely a feature /sWhen you’re relying on a bug as a feature
I’ve still never used ipv6. It just never offered anything I needed.
If you live in the USA you don’t suffer from the problem it solves because you have ~5 IP v4 addresses per capita (totaling to 41% of all the IP v4 addresses), and likewise many european countries have ~2 per capita (although there are expeptions like Italy and Spain which are a bit under 1 per capita). However many other countries don’t have such luxury, for example in india there’s one for every 36 people, which is obviously not enough and thus they have to either use NAT everywhere or switch to IPv6.
I’m in Indonesia right now. Stuff can be randomly offline or blocked because they think I’ve already accessed or am spamming something. Even little things like New York Times saying “you’ve reached your free limit for today” but I didn’t even have internet access for a couple of days!
There isn’t 5 addresses per person in the US. They use NAT like everyone else. I think you know this though.
No the number is public. The IPv4 addresses allocated to the US are about 1.524 Billion, and there are ~332 million people in the US. Most of those IPv4 addresses are allocated to servers in datacenters, but individual people having a public IP for their house is really common. Yeah, your devices are behind NAT, but you can get one. To their point, in countries like India, people outnumber IPv4 addresses so much this isn’t possible. Just getting people there online in a way they can interact with the IPv4 Internet is tricky to do well.
They are allocated in levels though, so you can’t just get an individual unused address if the top level has been allocated to IBM or Cisco or the DoD. It’s not democratic.
Have you tried being less poor?
deleted by creator
No
Luckily for me I’m not poor.
Same. I’m hearing it’s a must-have for like 15 years now. It still obviously isn’t a real must-have.
Depends on where you are. It’s a must-have in parts of the world that don’t have enough IPv4 addresses.
I remember hearing that it meant every device could have a unique IP. But we still have NAT…
You don’t have NATs in the IPv6 world…
You may have.
For example, T-Mobile in many places gives you an IPv6 address and uses CG-NAT for IPv4 — meaning you don’t have your own IPv4, but you do have a few quintillion “real” IPv6’s to yourself.
How hard is it to support IPv6? Does it require new hardware?
It’s not generally a hardware problem. It’s a resourcing problem. Companies like GitHub will have complex software and architecture. IPv6 requires them to get a pool of IP addresses, come up with an IP address management strategy, make sure all hosts have IPv6 addresses meaning that now provisioning systems and tooling to management DNS has to plumb IPv6 addresses through too.
Then the software stack has to support it. Maybe their fraud detection or auditing systems have to now support IPv6 which means changes to API schemas.
None of this is a good reason why they shouldn’t do it, but I’ve had to make similar decisions at my job as a software engineer on what looks to be simple but actually requires changes across systems.
I always use Github to check if my IPv4 DNS works lol (using
ping). So it’s definitely a feature /sNeither do I.
Also a reminder for me to add IPv6 support for my personal site. I think most cloud providers are able to offer dual ipv4/v6 support if you ask for it/configure it.
I’ve talked to several network engineers over the years about IPv6, engineers that work as hands on with actual production infrastructure as you can get. And they all said that IPv6 would likely never be fully adopted.
But why ?
I am not a full network engineer so take my opinion with a grain of salt. From what I understand, NAT with IPv4 works really really well to mitigate IPv4 address exhaustion. Then there’s an issue with the amount of extra processing switches and routers need to do IPv6, we’re going from 32 bits to 128 bits which is a huge increase and for switches and routers that are handling packets as fast as technically possible with a low amount of resources typically, that’s a not insignificant hurdle.
It’s just easier to do IPv4 in every way, plus that’s what the world’s been using and is used to.
You can’t talk about NAT and then mention speed in the same statement…
The 128-bit IPv6 addresses are just four simple 32-bit integers if you think about it, but with NAT you have juggle around and maintain the (internal IP, internal Port, external IP, external Port, Protocol) tuples all the time. That’s a significant overhead. Also, switches typically deal with the Layer 2 stuffs. IP is Layer 3.
See the HN discussion for more information.
It’s just easier to do IPv4 in every way
Except when you have to NAT transversal. Then you are in a world of hurt.
Well, there’s the actual engineer response I was looking for
My understanding is it’s no longer that critical. The sky is no longer falling on IPv4
The numerous CGNAT deployed worldwide suggests otherwise.
deleted by creator
I also don’t have an IPv6 address. It’s my one complaint about my otherwise excellent ISP. They are offering /56 static IPv6 blocks for their multi-gigabit customers now, but not on the cheap plan I’m on. Not yet, at least 🤞.
Ok 🤷♂️
