7 ms·

GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages

128 points by scrollaway 5y ago

jlelse 5y ago
But github.com is still missing... https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2021/08/github-ipv6 https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2021/08/github-ipv6
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chrismorgan 5y ago
> GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages This is extremely misleading at best. As far as I can tell from reading this stuff, the only thing that has changed recently is that github-repository-files.githubusercontent.com has started serving an AAAA record. (Perhaps other subdomains as well, but that’s the only one reported and it’s definitely not all.) That’s nothing to do with GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages has unofficially supported IPv6 for more than three years apart from the DNS records, so if you’re brave or foolish enough you could add AAAA records on a custom domain that’s handled by GitHub Pages.
- lima 5y ago
  Don't underestimate the amount of backend plumbing necessary to enable this kind of thing at scale, even if it's "just" a CDN feature flag (analytics pipeline, authorization, rate limiting, and so much more...)
- pitaj 5y ago
  > AAAA record Tangent here. Does anyone know why DNS record names are so terrible? Why are there records named after batteries?
  - jrockway 5y ago
    A means address. The IPv6 variant is called AAAA because IPv6 addresses are 4x longer than IPv4 addresses.
    - toast0 5y ago
      Also, A6 is probably a better name, but it has a worse (unworkable?) format, so AAAA is a reasonable second choice.
      - Gigachad 5y ago
        It's not that hard to say anyway. You read it as "quad a".
        chrismorgan 5y ago
        Fun fact: I mulled over whether to write “an AAAA record” or “a AAAA record”. I ended up deciding to go with “an AAAA record” even though I would read it “a quadruple A record” which is physically easier to say than “an A A A A record”.
        jrockway 5y ago
        Hah, I spell out the As -- "an A A A A record". I also call it "w w w" and not "dub dub dub" as some people do. Though I feel neither come up in conversation all that often.
        chrismorgan 5y ago
        In Australia I can’t recall hearing anything other than “double you double you double you”. (But if we could do a bit of language reform, shortening w, 7 and 0 each to a single syllable like all the other letters and digits would be the first thing I’d do.) But then, “double you” flows in sequence a bit better than “ay”.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - thayne 5y ago
    Probably because they wanted to keep them short. AAAA records are so named because it is the ipv6 equivalent of an A record, and ipv6 addresses are four times as long as ipv4 addresses. I agree it is pretty terrible though.
dheera 5y ago
Too bad I often have to disable IPv6 because my ISP suddenly decides to stop routing it from time to time. This is Comcast, so arguing with them doesn't get me anywhere, all I get is "Thanks for expressing your concern." "Rest assured that I will solve all your problems." from the support dude in some random call/chat center.
- miyuru 5y ago
  Doesn't Happy Eyeballs fallback to IPv4 on that situation?
  - dheera 5y ago
    Maybe it's supposed to in theory but empirical results on my machine say it doesn't
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Anecdata: Enabling IPv6 does seem to break random stuff randomly.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      If something has a network problem but it's not the uplink and it isn't DNS, then disabling ipv6 is definitely the next in the list.
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    Sort of. There needs to be more intelligence at the client end though. I have a fairly decent IPv6 link but it can still fail in strange ways, that does not mirror the IPv4 link. Then again the IPv4 link has moved in mysterious ways from time to time. Happy Eyeballs isn't quite fully prevalent and it hasn't seen all failure modes yet nor how to deal with them. Internets is a really hard problem. For starters: define "connected". My wife will sometimes suggest that our internet connection is not working - she implies that her laptop (Arch Linux - obvs) is completely broken. What is really happening is that Mr Zuckerberg's thang has wandered off for a break and a smoko. This morning it was our mail server. Hit the wifi kill switch by accident then internet will not work. I've disabled the kill switch.
ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
Silly question (especially for this forum): how would ipv6 be useful for websites served via Github Pages?
- andrewjf 5y ago
  There are more and more networks that are native IPv6. And IPv4 connectivity is done with double NAT, NAT64, 464XLAT and other heroics. The faster we can allow native IPv6 end-to-end, the faster we can get rid of the complex IPv4 compatibility technologies and simplify the entire internet. At some point, you may start to see networks with no v4 connectivity whatsoever (maybe they already exist, but I can't imagine them being useful), so this allows those users to reach github pages. To directly answer your question, it's investment and maintenance in infrastructure, not for user features.
  - rnhmjoj 5y ago
    > maybe they already exist, but I can't imagine them being useful They are rare but do exist! Here's a couple of reports from the IPv6 subreddit: [1] [2]. [1]: https://teddit.net/r/ipv6/comments/he38ga/work_has_turned_off_ipv4_and_says_there_are_no/ https://teddit.net/r/ipv6/comments/he38ga/work_has_turned_of... [2]: https://teddit.net/r/ipv6/comments/n5y5oo/update_on_not_being_able_to_access_older_websites/ https://teddit.net/r/ipv6/comments/n5y5oo/update_on_not_bein...
- Gigachad 5y ago
  It's nothing critical but some ISPs use multiple layers of hacks to work IPv4 and certain types of networking become very unreliable over it. Things like long running connections will be dropped because the ISP routers do not maintain the NAT mapping forever. For github pages its probably not going to make a huge difference but for things like SSH or file transfers it could be an issue. For things like video game servers or home servers you just flat out can not work them on v4 if your ISP uses CG-NAT.
remram 5y ago
I'm surprised they didn't have it until now. Every cloud provider's load balancer and CDN has had IPv6 for a while. That they don't have it for the site or SSH is less surprising, but GitHub Pages is static content.
- jrockway 5y ago
  Maybe AWS, Azure, and GCP, but not places like Digital Ocean. IPv6 is still very niche, and it's suffering from that effect where it being very niche keeps it very niche. Nobody wants to be an early adopter (and momentum seems to be dying), and the result is that there's no adoption. I think we've been trying to make IPv6 happen since 1998, and ... it's not happening.
  - profmonocle 5y ago
    > it's not happening. It's absolutely glacial, but IPv6 adoption has been steadily rising over the last 8 or so years. Unfortunately the increase has been linear rather than exponential. That is, according to Google's stats of clients accessing their properties. Not a perfect snapshot of worldwide Internet users, but a pretty decent one. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      Even a linear growth is fine. By 2030 there will be pretty much 100% adoption at this pace. There may even be a tipping point when places like India are so stretched for v4 addresses and v6 is so widespread where local sites go v6 only which triggers a much faster adoption rate on the consumer side.
      - est31 5y ago
        This website says that the 100% will be reached by 2030, but only if you use the quadratic model: https://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/project.php?metric=p&timeforward=3650&timebackward=3477&country=ww https://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/project.php?metric=p&timef... If you use the linear model, growth is slower and the 100% will be reached by 2038.
brirec 5y ago
It would be nice if Verizon was interested in providing IPv6 access via their Fios service at all in 2021.
- sodality2 5y ago
  This user says they have IPV6 with FiOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27985103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27985103 I have FiOS as well and I'm only a few miles from them. I attempted to get IPV6 from the router settings and it didn't work for me.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  It would be nice to see this forced by law.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    It should be as simple as not being allowed to advertise a service as providing Internet unless it provides 100% native, full-featured IPv6. Imagine if in 2001 some company tried to sell an "Internet service" that didn't provide IPv4, or only provided RFC1918 addresses, or didn't allow something as trivial as non-NAT routing of IPv4, even as an option. They'd be sued for false advertising, and rightly so. Meanwhile, in 2021 tier-1 cloud providers like Azure have an absolute shitshow of partial IPv6 support, yet they get away with advertising that they provide "Internet connectivity". They provide only private ranges, and force NAT for all IPv6 traffic. The vast majority of their services are IPv4 only, so enabling IPv6 is mostly pointless. Worse, if you do enable IPv6 on their virtual networks, this then disables unrelated IPv4 functionality. It's madness.
    - aoetalks 5y ago
      I run a full dual stack service in Azure [1]. I couldn’t get instance level IPv6 working, but everything else works in both v4 and v6. I will echo that many Azure services don’t support v6 yet, though. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/ipv6-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/ipv6-...
fairytale 5y ago
No. https://dns.google/resolve?name=github.io&type=AAAA https://dns.google/resolve?name=github.io&type=AAAA
knxl 5y ago
A very bad title for the post, by the way.
e-master 5y ago
Apologies for the silly question, but what’s so difficult in adopting v6? Cloud providers spend billions on new hardware every year, I’m honestly surprised at reading that some of them don’t fully support it yet? Is there some specific technical issue preventing them from mass adoption?
- bombcar 5y ago
  It's a chicken and egg problem - websites, etc don't want to enable IPv6 because clients have broken IPv6 implementations and that causes delays and issues, and clients have broken IPv6 implementations because the internet providers don't care to fix it because nobody uses it. (Many computers THINK they have IPv6 connectivity when they do NOT and so if they see an AAAA record and try to connect to it, it can cause a delay while that fails. Most browsers are better at this now (they will try to connect to both and show whichever answers faster), but not all network things are browsers.)
- patrakov 5y ago
  In the past, one of the factors was SEO. A few years ago (in 2018, to be precise), the company I worked for tried enabling IPv6 on some of our websites, and observed some drop in Google ranking, that recovered when the IPv6 experiment was undone.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    Sorry but this is just too anecdotal for me. There are so many factors that go into Google rankings and Google itself makes it pretty easy to discover any crawling or indexing issues on a website that it seems the root cause of the issue should have been discovered (if it was due to a crawl/index) and I doubt it was a properly working ipv6 setup (something broke somewhere on your company's end is what I'm getting at). Cloudflare uses ipv6 and I doubt all their customers websites were being penalized by Google
    - patrakov 5y ago
      Well, it was just a stock Hetzner dedicated server. All that was added/removed is a DNS AAAA record pointing to the server's IPv6 address. We used IPv6 before in order to access LXC containers hosted on that server. If THAT counts as a broken setup (which I doubt, see below), then, sorry, I don't see how we could do better. I have personally checked the result from my then-home connection (unfortunately, through he.net tunnel) and it worked, and it was properly logged by Apache. The CEO had native IPv6 on the phone, and it also worked for him, and, according to Apache logs, IPv6 was also used. I have also checked that the site was still accessible over IPv4. So I indeed don't know what went wrong. On the other hand, I did not have access to Google webmaster console and had to trust the CEO that the SEO problem exists. It might have been a coincidence. And again, the SEO problem was in 2018, and is likely irrelevant today even if it really existed back then, that's why I said "in the past".
throwaway93626 5y ago
I recently moved to a new city and signed up with a medium-sized regional ISP. I was disappointed when I set up my router and saw I didn’t have an IPv6 address. I searched the web for “${MY_ISP} IPv6” and found their FAQ page with the following entry (paraphrased): > Q: Does $ISP support IPv6? > A: Yes! $ISP supports IPv6. For instructions on configuring your router…. I spent an hour trying and failing to get it working. Frustrated that I’d just invested so much time and not wanting it to be a total waste, I called customer service and, as you can imagine, I had an extremely difficult time trying to convince anyone that I didn’t need to turn my router off and on again. Over the span of a few weeks, I tried calling twice and using their live chat once to ask about IPv6. At this point it was a matter of principle, if their website said they supported it I was going to hold them to it. Each time I communicated with them, I got a different answer as to why IPv6 wasn’t working: one person told me they do support it but not in my area, another person told me they don’t support it at all, and the third person told me that they did “offer” it but did not “support” it. Each time I read them the FAQ page entry which explicitly said they do support it with no conditions. By their responses, it was obvious that they thought I was a weirdo, but I just really wanted them to give me the IPv6 that they’d promised. After all of this failed, I tried one last thing: I submitted a complaint with the FCC about misleading advertising. Before you call me a Karen, I wasn’t trying to get anyone in trouble or to get special treatment or whatever. I just wanted them to provide the services they promised. I specifically mentioned that I had nothing but positive experiences with the staff that I’d interacted with and that my issue was just a technical/marketing one. Well, whaddya know, I got a lovely email within 6 hours thanking me for bringing the issue to their attention, saying that they had identified a configuration issue in my local area, and that they had scheduled maintenance for the next day to fix it. And within 24 hours I (and presumably hundreds of my neighbors) had working IPv6! Was it worth the time and effort? For IPv6, no. But for the satisfaction of getting a corporation to follow through with their word? Also, no. But for the ability to write this comment? Well, no. And I suspect this is how just about everyone who has ever spent more than an hour banging their head against a wall trying to get IPv6 working has felt in the end. Like, wow, I can now look at literally the same exact cat pictures as I did before but now I have access to 79 octillion times as many addresses, yay? That’s my best guess as to why we’re still in the dark ages of 2^32 internet addresses. Side note, their FAQ page has been changed to say “IPv6 is supported in most areas”. I’m at least proud to know I’m the reason for a few more weasel words on a corporate marketing website. Success.

128 points by scrollaway 5y ago

But github.com is still missing... https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2021/08/github-ipv6 https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2021/08/github-ipv6

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

chrismorgan 5y ago

> GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages This is extremely misleading at best. As far as I can tell from reading this stuff, the only thing that has changed recently is that github-repository-files.githubusercontent.com has started serving an AAAA record. (Perhaps other subdomains as well, but that’s the only one reported and it’s definitely not all.) That’s nothing to do with GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages has unofficially supported IPv6 for more than three years apart from the DNS records, so if you’re brave or foolish enough you could add AAAA records on a custom domain that’s handled by GitHub Pages.

lima 5y ago
Don't underestimate the amount of backend plumbing necessary to enable this kind of thing at scale, even if it's "just" a CDN feature flag (analytics pipeline, authorization, rate limiting, and so much more...)
pitaj 5y ago
> AAAA record Tangent here. Does anyone know why DNS record names are so terrible? Why are there records named after batteries?
- jrockway 5y ago
  A means address. The IPv6 variant is called AAAA because IPv6 addresses are 4x longer than IPv4 addresses.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Also, A6 is probably a better name, but it has a worse (unworkable?) format, so AAAA is a reasonable second choice.
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      It's not that hard to say anyway. You read it as "quad a".
      - chrismorgan 5y ago
        Fun fact: I mulled over whether to write “an AAAA record” or “a AAAA record”. I ended up deciding to go with “an AAAA record” even though I would read it “a quadruple A record” which is physically easier to say than “an A A A A record”.
        jrockway 5y ago
        Hah, I spell out the As -- "an A A A A record". I also call it "w w w" and not "dub dub dub" as some people do. Though I feel neither come up in conversation all that often.
        chrismorgan 5y ago
        In Australia I can’t recall hearing anything other than “double you double you double you”. (But if we could do a bit of language reform, shortening w, 7 and 0 each to a single syllable like all the other letters and digits would be the first thing I’d do.) But then, “double you” flows in sequence a bit better than “ay”.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- thayne 5y ago
  Probably because they wanted to keep them short. AAAA records are so named because it is the ipv6 equivalent of an A record, and ipv6 addresses are four times as long as ipv4 addresses. I agree it is pretty terrible though.

dheera 5y ago

Too bad I often have to disable IPv6 because my ISP suddenly decides to stop routing it from time to time. This is Comcast, so arguing with them doesn't get me anywhere, all I get is "Thanks for expressing your concern." "Rest assured that I will solve all your problems." from the support dude in some random call/chat center.

miyuru 5y ago
Doesn't Happy Eyeballs fallback to IPv4 on that situation?
- dheera 5y ago
  Maybe it's supposed to in theory but empirical results on my machine say it doesn't
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Anecdata: Enabling IPv6 does seem to break random stuff randomly.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    If something has a network problem but it's not the uplink and it isn't DNS, then disabling ipv6 is definitely the next in the list.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  Sort of. There needs to be more intelligence at the client end though. I have a fairly decent IPv6 link but it can still fail in strange ways, that does not mirror the IPv4 link. Then again the IPv4 link has moved in mysterious ways from time to time. Happy Eyeballs isn't quite fully prevalent and it hasn't seen all failure modes yet nor how to deal with them. Internets is a really hard problem. For starters: define "connected". My wife will sometimes suggest that our internet connection is not working - she implies that her laptop (Arch Linux - obvs) is completely broken. What is really happening is that Mr Zuckerberg's thang has wandered off for a break and a smoko. This morning it was our mail server. Hit the wifi kill switch by accident then internet will not work. I've disabled the kill switch.

ahmedfromtunis 5y ago

Silly question (especially for this forum): how would ipv6 be useful for websites served via Github Pages?

andrewjf 5y ago
There are more and more networks that are native IPv6. And IPv4 connectivity is done with double NAT, NAT64, 464XLAT and other heroics. The faster we can allow native IPv6 end-to-end, the faster we can get rid of the complex IPv4 compatibility technologies and simplify the entire internet. At some point, you may start to see networks with no v4 connectivity whatsoever (maybe they already exist, but I can't imagine them being useful), so this allows those users to reach github pages. To directly answer your question, it's investment and maintenance in infrastructure, not for user features.
- rnhmjoj 5y ago
  > maybe they already exist, but I can't imagine them being useful They are rare but do exist! Here's a couple of reports from the IPv6 subreddit: [1] [2]. [1]: https://teddit.net/r/ipv6/comments/he38ga/work_has_turned_off_ipv4_and_says_there_are_no/ https://teddit.net/r/ipv6/comments/he38ga/work_has_turned_of... [2]: https://teddit.net/r/ipv6/comments/n5y5oo/update_on_not_being_able_to_access_older_websites/ https://teddit.net/r/ipv6/comments/n5y5oo/update_on_not_bein...
Gigachad 5y ago
It's nothing critical but some ISPs use multiple layers of hacks to work IPv4 and certain types of networking become very unreliable over it. Things like long running connections will be dropped because the ISP routers do not maintain the NAT mapping forever. For github pages its probably not going to make a huge difference but for things like SSH or file transfers it could be an issue. For things like video game servers or home servers you just flat out can not work them on v4 if your ISP uses CG-NAT.

remram 5y ago

I'm surprised they didn't have it until now. Every cloud provider's load balancer and CDN has had IPv6 for a while. That they don't have it for the site or SSH is less surprising, but GitHub Pages is static content.

jrockway 5y ago
Maybe AWS, Azure, and GCP, but not places like Digital Ocean. IPv6 is still very niche, and it's suffering from that effect where it being very niche keeps it very niche. Nobody wants to be an early adopter (and momentum seems to be dying), and the result is that there's no adoption. I think we've been trying to make IPv6 happen since 1998, and ... it's not happening.
- profmonocle 5y ago
  > it's not happening. It's absolutely glacial, but IPv6 adoption has been steadily rising over the last 8 or so years. Unfortunately the increase has been linear rather than exponential. That is, according to Google's stats of clients accessing their properties. Not a perfect snapshot of worldwide Internet users, but a pretty decent one. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    Even a linear growth is fine. By 2030 there will be pretty much 100% adoption at this pace. There may even be a tipping point when places like India are so stretched for v4 addresses and v6 is so widespread where local sites go v6 only which triggers a much faster adoption rate on the consumer side.
    - est31 5y ago
      This website says that the 100% will be reached by 2030, but only if you use the quadratic model: https://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/project.php?metric=p&timeforward=3650&timebackward=3477&country=ww https://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/project.php?metric=p&timef... If you use the linear model, growth is slower and the 100% will be reached by 2038.

brirec 5y ago

It would be nice if Verizon was interested in providing IPv6 access via their Fios service at all in 2021.

sodality2 5y ago
This user says they have IPV6 with FiOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27985103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27985103 I have FiOS as well and I'm only a few miles from them. I attempted to get IPV6 from the router settings and it didn't work for me.
Ericson2314 5y ago
It would be nice to see this forced by law.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  It should be as simple as not being allowed to advertise a service as providing Internet unless it provides 100% native, full-featured IPv6. Imagine if in 2001 some company tried to sell an "Internet service" that didn't provide IPv4, or only provided RFC1918 addresses, or didn't allow something as trivial as non-NAT routing of IPv4, even as an option. They'd be sued for false advertising, and rightly so. Meanwhile, in 2021 tier-1 cloud providers like Azure have an absolute shitshow of partial IPv6 support, yet they get away with advertising that they provide "Internet connectivity". They provide only private ranges, and force NAT for all IPv6 traffic. The vast majority of their services are IPv4 only, so enabling IPv6 is mostly pointless. Worse, if you do enable IPv6 on their virtual networks, this then disables unrelated IPv4 functionality. It's madness.
  - aoetalks 5y ago
    I run a full dual stack service in Azure [1]. I couldn’t get instance level IPv6 working, but everything else works in both v4 and v6. I will echo that many Azure services don’t support v6 yet, though. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/ipv6-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/ipv6-...

fairytale 5y ago

No. https://dns.google/resolve?name=github.io&type=AAAA https://dns.google/resolve?name=github.io&type=AAAA

knxl 5y ago

A very bad title for the post, by the way.

e-master 5y ago

Apologies for the silly question, but what’s so difficult in adopting v6? Cloud providers spend billions on new hardware every year, I’m honestly surprised at reading that some of them don’t fully support it yet? Is there some specific technical issue preventing them from mass adoption?

bombcar 5y ago
It's a chicken and egg problem - websites, etc don't want to enable IPv6 because clients have broken IPv6 implementations and that causes delays and issues, and clients have broken IPv6 implementations because the internet providers don't care to fix it because nobody uses it. (Many computers THINK they have IPv6 connectivity when they do NOT and so if they see an AAAA record and try to connect to it, it can cause a delay while that fails. Most browsers are better at this now (they will try to connect to both and show whichever answers faster), but not all network things are browsers.)
patrakov 5y ago
In the past, one of the factors was SEO. A few years ago (in 2018, to be precise), the company I worked for tried enabling IPv6 on some of our websites, and observed some drop in Google ranking, that recovered when the IPv6 experiment was undone.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  Sorry but this is just too anecdotal for me. There are so many factors that go into Google rankings and Google itself makes it pretty easy to discover any crawling or indexing issues on a website that it seems the root cause of the issue should have been discovered (if it was due to a crawl/index) and I doubt it was a properly working ipv6 setup (something broke somewhere on your company's end is what I'm getting at). Cloudflare uses ipv6 and I doubt all their customers websites were being penalized by Google
  - patrakov 5y ago
    Well, it was just a stock Hetzner dedicated server. All that was added/removed is a DNS AAAA record pointing to the server's IPv6 address. We used IPv6 before in order to access LXC containers hosted on that server. If THAT counts as a broken setup (which I doubt, see below), then, sorry, I don't see how we could do better. I have personally checked the result from my then-home connection (unfortunately, through he.net tunnel) and it worked, and it was properly logged by Apache. The CEO had native IPv6 on the phone, and it also worked for him, and, according to Apache logs, IPv6 was also used. I have also checked that the site was still accessible over IPv4. So I indeed don't know what went wrong. On the other hand, I did not have access to Google webmaster console and had to trust the CEO that the SEO problem exists. It might have been a coincidence. And again, the SEO problem was in 2018, and is likely irrelevant today even if it really existed back then, that's why I said "in the past".

throwaway93626 5y ago

I recently moved to a new city and signed up with a medium-sized regional ISP. I was disappointed when I set up my router and saw I didn’t have an IPv6 address. I searched the web for “${MY_ISP} IPv6” and found their FAQ page with the following entry (paraphrased): > Q: Does $ISP support IPv6? > A: Yes! $ISP supports IPv6. For instructions on configuring your router…. I spent an hour trying and failing to get it working. Frustrated that I’d just invested so much time and not wanting it to be a total waste, I called customer service and, as you can imagine, I had an extremely difficult time trying to convince anyone that I didn’t need to turn my router off and on again. Over the span of a few weeks, I tried calling twice and using their live chat once to ask about IPv6. At this point it was a matter of principle, if their website said they supported it I was going to hold them to it. Each time I communicated with them, I got a different answer as to why IPv6 wasn’t working: one person told me they do support it but not in my area, another person told me they don’t support it at all, and the third person told me that they did “offer” it but did not “support” it. Each time I read them the FAQ page entry which explicitly said they do support it with no conditions. By their responses, it was obvious that they thought I was a weirdo, but I just really wanted them to give me the IPv6 that they’d promised. After all of this failed, I tried one last thing: I submitted a complaint with the FCC about misleading advertising. Before you call me a Karen, I wasn’t trying to get anyone in trouble or to get special treatment or whatever. I just wanted them to provide the services they promised. I specifically mentioned that I had nothing but positive experiences with the staff that I’d interacted with and that my issue was just a technical/marketing one. Well, whaddya know, I got a lovely email within 6 hours thanking me for bringing the issue to their attention, saying that they had identified a configuration issue in my local area, and that they had scheduled maintenance for the next day to fix it. And within 24 hours I (and presumably hundreds of my neighbors) had working IPv6! Was it worth the time and effort? For IPv6, no. But for the satisfaction of getting a corporation to follow through with their word? Also, no. But for the ability to write this comment? Well, no. And I suspect this is how just about everyone who has ever spent more than an hour banging their head against a wall trying to get IPv6 working has felt in the end. Like, wow, I can now look at literally the same exact cat pictures as I did before but now I have access to 79 octillion times as many addresses, yay? That’s my best guess as to why we’re still in the dark ages of 2^32 internet addresses. Side note, their FAQ page has been changed to say “IPv6 is supported in most areas”. I’m at least proud to know I’m the reason for a few more weasel words on a corporate marketing website. Success.