IPv6 support for Github Pages

[stephengroat]

Are there any plans to implement IPv6 support for Github Pages? It's a great hosting solution (I'd even be willing to pay a few $ a year to keep having it), but the lack of IPv6 support is kinda a bummer.

[toreanderson]

This issue has been resolved:

$ host toreanderson.github.io
toreanderson.github.io is an alias for sni.github.map.fastly.net.
sni.github.map.fastly.net has address 151.101.85.147
sni.github.map.fastly.net has IPv6 address 2a04:4e42:14::403

Cf. https://toreanderson.github.io/2017/07/30/update-ghp-fastly-ipv6.html

[kumy]

I can confirm too.

[vanaf]

Still missing AAAA records there https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-an-apex-domain/#configuring-a-records-with-your-dns-provider

[tambry]

I'm afraid the issue is back. Someone has broken IPv6 support.

Example:

[root@me ~]# host ibm.github.io
ibm.github.io is an alias for sni.github.map.fastly.net.
sni.github.map.fastly.net has address 185.199.108.153
sni.github.map.fastly.net has address 185.199.109.153
sni.github.map.fastly.net has address 185.199.110.153
sni.github.map.fastly.net has address 185.199.111.153

[tekrobotics]

We were testing https security with the SSL Server Test and saw the same IPv4 addresses as above. IPv6 support seems to be broken at the moment. Using host returns the same confirmation.

[tambry]

GitHub's response:

Thanks for writing in! The behavior you noticed is expected. This past week, we moved to an IPv4-only IP space to support HTTPS for GitHub Pages sites with custom domains:

https://blog.github.com/2018-05-01-github-pages-custom-domains-https/

Support for IPv6 was an undocumented feature, and one that isn't supported by GitHub itself, but we removed IPv6 support on purpose over this last week.

Having said that, we can definitely see what you mean when it comes to providing support for IPv6. While I can't make any promises as to if or when we'll officially support it in the future, I'll let the team know you'd like to see us provide official support for IPv6.

[modonovan]

Hi team,
I'd love to resurrect this discussion (about re-enabling IPv6 on custom domains for GitHub pages sites. I'm a bit of a noob to GitHub if I'm totally honest and apart from doing the odd clone, add, commit, push from time to time I haven't really used the functionality that wisely. Recently though, I was at a meetup in Dublin where Anna Wilson (https://twitter.com/yesitsanna) was giving a talk. It was very much a seed change for me. I have been a hobbiest web developer over the years for the likes of clubs and societies and that kind of thing. Mostly hosted on either my own server using wordpress or similar. Anna's talk was extremely poignant in that it spoke of the real life challenges of doing this today and how it was high time to utilise something like GitHub pages to host your sites. The basic theory was that GitHub really knows where it's at in terms of "bug fixes", "security" and "best practice". With Jekyll integration in GitHub pages I've started to really agree. So much so that I recently migrated my test site (a personal blog) to GitHub pages. I migrated my DNS to point at it and all was seeming perfect until I started to notice some cert errors/notifications in Chrome. Ultimately it was due to the fact that the letsencrypt.org cert could not be attached to my site due to the presence of AAAA records in my DNS.

I've since corrected that to remove them but I have to admit I feel it's a backward step. I was using letsencrypt on my own host and all was working with both IPv4 and IPv6.

To that end I am seeking some support from the Github team to relaunch the availability of IPv6 (with https support) on GitHub pages.

Is there anyone in agreement with me on this?

Thanks in advance,

Mick

[tambry]

@modonovan Their old IPv6 CDN address still works for HTTP-only – just add 2a04:4e42::403 to your domain. No problems with HTTPS either.

[modonovan]

@tambry Cheers dude, is that an "official" way to get things working or does it "just work" using this address do you know?

[tambry]

@modonovan It just works, definitely not official. Quick correction to my previous comment – it only works for non-HTTPS. For HTTPS support GitHub uses their own IPv4 address space behind Fastly, and the old IPv6 addresses don't point to the newer infra, which is capable of serving HTTPS certificates for custom domains. But GitHub Pages itself still can serve using HTTPS over IPv6, it just returns *.github.io certificates. Should really only be a matter of GitHub adding their IPv6 address space to the newer CDN infra and documenting it (they've already got their IPv6 prefixes since forever).

Their own custom load balancer supports IPv6 as far as I can tell, but that seems to be only used for everything besides their CDN endpoints and GitHub Pages.

FYI, one can reach GitHub's CDN domains (e.g. assets-cdn.github.com) through [2a04:4e42::200:403], [2a04:4e42::400:403], [2a04:4e42::600:403] (those should be Anycast addresses). Correct certificates are served, so it just works. Here are my hosts file entries for them:

2a04:4e42::133 assets-cdn.github.com
2a04:4e42::133 camo.githubusercontent.com
2a04:4e42::133 cloud.githubusercontent.com
2a04:4e42::133 gist.githubusercontent.com
2a04:4e42::133 avatars.githubusercontent.com
2a04:4e42::133 avatars0.githubusercontent.com
2a04:4e42::133 avatars1.githubusercontent.com
2a04:4e42::133 avatars2.githubusercontent.com
2a04:4e42::133 avatars3.githubusercontent.com
2a04:4e42::133 marketplace-images.githubusercontent.com
2a04:4e42::133 user-images.githubusercontent.com
2a04:4e42::133 raw.githubusercontent.com

[modonovan]

I see that's what I thought. Any chance we can lobby Github folks to maybe seek to make this officially supported and add the addresses behind Fastly inline with their IPv4 space?