ProgrammerHumor
its2025
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Odd given a decade ago I failed a Microsoft server admin exam as 1/3 of the questions were on ipv6 (a single chapter in the book) which due to bad lecturers at university and not needing it... I didn't bother learning for the exam.
how ironic
Yeah, I was unable to connect to Github from time to time where everything else worked fine.
Took my a while to notice that a platform that big isn't connected to 2025 internet.
Same for alternative search engine, they didn't work so I went to Google and it worked, turned out they don't have any AAAA record.
What, why? What's it do?
Well IPv6 is a better standard than IPv4. IPv6 improves address allocation space and is overall more easily and effectively routable. Doesn't use NAT type routing (but has something called prefix delegation which I don't know about).
I said this from my head with no sources and know nothing about IPv6.
IPv4 is like a 1967 mustang tho
I was thinking an 87 Camry: it works well enough, kinda ugly, and will never die.
IPv6 Prefix delegation is a way to give client a block of IPv6 they can use to do whatever they want. An IPv4 equivalent would be giving your user a public IPv4 /24.
IPv6 Prefix delegation is a way to give client a block of IPv6 they can use to do whatever they want.
OVH does this. Just handed my single server an entire /64 for free. And because I'm immature I only use 4655:434B:594F:5521
Prefix delegation is a process where routers can request an IPv6 prefix from your ISP. That prefix can then be further divided into IPv6 ranges for your local networks. For example, if I get a prefix back with a /60 at the end of it, that means I can assign 16 local networks with subnets of /64 (264 addresses per network).
When a device requests an IPv6 address, technologies such as DHCPv6 and SLAAC (prefer SLAAC on home networks) will be used to automatically assign an address within the IPv6 range of the network. These addresses assigned are global meaning that I no longer need to use NAT to make connections to and from my devices.
Now explain this to me like I’m 5 year old
If you live in an apartment building, the mailman typically doesn’t deliver your packages directly to your door. It might be delivered to the front office or a designated room for mail (public IPv4 address). That mail then needs to either picked up or delivered to each tenant from that room (private IPv4 address).
IPv6 is like when each person living in the complex is assigned an address and the mailman directly picks up and delivers the mail to each person. Though they still need to go through the front office so that the staff can verify the mailman is allowed to deliver packages (firewall).
increases connection speed and future proofs it i guess
I don’t see how IPv4/IPv6 would have an impact on connection speeds.
No more nat -> less latency
In practice, I’m not seeing a huge difference atm. Probably cause I don’t have enough traffic on my network to notice.
Firewalls handle packets in nano seconds and the NAT process is only a tiny part of that, I doubt that 99.9....% of people care about that type of latency. You still need a firewal in front of your network anyway so the performance increase from dropping NAT is not something anyone will notice
How many people are directly exposing services to the internet? Even with IPv6, I would still put a service behind a load balancer and onto a completely different VPC that is probably ipv4 based.
you don't have the NAT PAT from your client router in the way, you don't have CGNAT in the way. When hosting you are now NOT obligated to use NAT at loadbalancing/firewalling time and this is much more efficient. You could for example decide to use round robin directly at the DNS level. Besides I skipped on other optimizations like packet integrity verification and header lenght that others pointed out.
Smaller header, which actually increases the performance with high package throughput and other technical improvements on how its routed etc. And making NAT obsolete
Yeah with half the internet broken I imagine the remainder doesn't have to fight for transit. 🤭
It's not gonna increase connection speed (except I guess in cases where it enables using a direct connection instead of a relay if both ends are behind NAT).
and in our case when ipv4 addresses have ran out many years ago it's pretty much always
Biggee address space = more complexity
Bigger adress space=bigger adress space.
You just get more adresses. It does mean the adresses get longer, so that's probably the complexity you were talking about.
The first rule of tautology club
.. is the first rule of the tautology club.
Doesn't it reduce complexity because theoretically someday we can do away with NAT since there are so many available addresses?
Does that mean we can connect Directly with IP adresses without needing all sorts of hacks like hole punching?
That's was my understanding as well, like you could probably allocate a billion addresses to anyone that will be alive within the next million years, and be just fine. We wouldn't need NAT as far as I know, just give the exact address for the NIC and we're done
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You're entirely wrong about the IPv6 notation. :: is how you condense consecutive 0's in the address, CIDR notation still applies.
So for example, fc10::2:0/112 is a valid network.
ETA: and also larger address spaces don't make the network itself slower to any degree worth discussing. That's not why we subnet.
IPv4 is deprecated and there are no subnets left, so some people can only use IPv6 and don't have a IPv4 Access anymore, therefore being blocked from sites like github
Not to mention AWS charges you extra for IPv4 now (yet ironically a lot of their own services don't support IPv6)
NAT64 helps with this. It’s what mobile carriers use to connect to IPv4 only sites since their networks are IPv6 only.
It allow people to connect to Github which more and more cannot currently as we don't have anymore IPv4 publicly available so future ISP will only have IPv6 which isn't compatible (to respond about the issue with Github, IPv6 has a lot of pros I didn't detail here)
This is especially annoying if you want don't want to pay the IPv4 fees on most hosting platforms. How the hell am I supposed to clone my repos? SCP?
Just dont use Github at all
IPv6 is so great. True per-device addressing kills the need for port forwarding, NAT, DDNS and a number of other kludges that helped IPv4 hold on for so long.
I have a number of services on my home network exposed via v6 addresses. They are routed directly without NAT or port forwarding—just firewall rules to allow traffic to address/port/transport.
I use a dual stack AWS box to proxy 4-to-6 traffic using a solution called SNID. I like this solution because it stuffs the v4-only address in the last 32 bits of the v6 proxy address, so it is possible to decode v4 source address for logging and troubleshooting if necessary.
I have gigabit internet in my home and, with (my beloved) ipv6. IPv6 is a great blessing in a country where cgnat is exists and static ipv4 are expensive. Until git clone doesn't work...
Looks like Microsoft is doing a full SpongeBob move by asking for IPv6 on GitHub, it's like it's jellyfish day. Add some Krabby Patties while you're at it.
The amount of problem I have just because my isp didnt play well with this makes using github painful
You can see the entire range of IP's GitHub uses/announces
Plenty of IPv6...
they don't have it for cloning or the main GitHub page
They do, they list ip addresses for each component
git operations:
"2a0a:a440::/29",
"2606:50c0::/32",
web UI:
"2a0a:a440::/29",
"2606:50c0::/32",
lol try cloning one only one ipv6 and see
LGTM
Tell this to my ISP who doesn’t support IPv6 despite being perfectly capable of delivering 2 gigabit fiber
throw some mail to higher ups.
My ISP still does not support IPv6 :/
ask them
Microsoft bought Github in 2018. Since then it has fucked up the UI, added AI assistance, forced two-factor authentication.
But adding IPv6? A straightforward, unambiguous technical improvement? Nope, Microsoft couldn't care less. Clearly marketing is in charge, not engineering.
forced two-factor authentication
Oh no!
It kinda sucks when cloning via CLI or on different machines. Username/password login was quite easy
Is it really a "straightforward, unambiguous technical improvement" if the top comment is about how it only mattered when their router blocked all ipv4 connections? GitHub should upgrade to ipv6, but truthfully it doesn't matter right now and I wouldn't expect them to make an upgrade like that if it didn't matter.
Also, it's definitely not "straightforward," at least not as straightforward as setting up 2fa on your account!
Of course it matters, plenty of people don't have an IPv4 connection, and that number will only increase, as we have run out of IPv4 addresses.
Pretty much the entire internet supports IPv6 now, but somehow that's too difficult for a trillion-dollar tech company? Give me a break.
No, thanks
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Read about it. Knowing the basics helps troubleshooting.
In the end it is just worse as you can't change GitHub itself, it is still IPv4 at the end. You shouldn't do workarounds for a highly popular website.
I had a bizarre issue with my router where it suddenly only accepted IPv6 connections. So I was only able to connect to popular sites like Youtube, Netflix, and Gmail. Of course Github was not one of those lol
Doesnt it perfom tuxedo routing where ipv4 can masqurade as ipv6?
I want to be invited to the tux masquerade internet ball…
Furries will be there, so you might want to reconsider
Furries are actually usually very alright in my experience. I'm pretty sure it's just a few notoriously bad ones that taint the names of everyone else.
Some people don't like us tho, and I don't want these people at our ball. Easiest way to scare them away.
i will be present
Only if it's been configured to
I think you have to manually setup NAT64. At least, I have to on my OPNsense router.
6to4 yes.
Something similar happened to me and it's how i learned one of my websites didn't support ipv6. I quickly resolved it, but I imagine github is a different beast.
Most Microsoft products don't support V6
Crazy to think about considering they’re one of the biggest cloud providers
The only reason why they stay the biggest is that transferring data is a pain in the ass
Their lack of IPv6 is just a prime example of "why would I put effort? I'm already the biggest"
Meta moved all their servers to IPv6. Considering the sheer amount of servers needed for Azure, I’m surprised they haven’t done the same.
Had the same problem. My ISP ran out of IPv4 but I still had my IPv6
Google worked, but my own ISP website to contact support didnt :D
An ISP site not accepting IPv6 is hilariously ironic
PM email: what have you acconplished in this sprint?
You: finished thst netflix serie
PM: you haven't delivered anything?
You: can't until Github support ipv6
AM (Actual Manager): You’re fired.
You: Good call.
Damn I have the opposite. I need to disable IPv6 in the ethernet adapter before it works
6to4 server crashed or router didn't get the update to connect to a 6to4
Well at least for me it's always that
A similar issue happened to my friend who added a wifi extender to their network which unpromptedly created a second DHCPv4 server, all sites stopped working except for those supporting IPv6
Hmm, is a VPN (with an IPv6 address) able to grant you access to IPv4 sites?