Re:GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages
by lima on Saturday August 14, 2021 @02:39PM
(#28182967)
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...)
Re:GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages
by pitaj on Saturday August 14, 2021 @11:05PM
(#28185949)
> AAAA record
Tangent here. Does anyone know why DNS record names are so terrible? Why are there records named after batteries?
Re:GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages
by jrockway on Saturday August 14, 2021 @11:38PM
(#28186076)
A means address. The IPv6 variant is called AAAA because IPv6 addresses are 4x longer than IPv4 addresses.
Re:GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages
by toast0 on Sunday August 15, 2021 @12:37AM
(#28186305)
Also, A6 is probably a better name, but it has a worse (unworkable?) format, so AAAA is a reasonable second choice.
Re:GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages
by Gigachad on Sunday August 15, 2021 @01:01AM
(#28186385)
It's not that hard to say anyway. You read it as "quad a".
Re:GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages
by chrismorgan on Sunday August 15, 2021 @06:30AM
(#28187673)
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”.
Re:GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages
by jrockway on Sunday August 15, 2021 @11:19PM
(#28194645)
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.
Re:GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages
by chrismorgan on Monday August 16, 2021 @05:32AM
(#28196355)
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”.
Re:GitHub seems to be enabling IPv6 for GitHub Pages
by thayne on Sunday August 15, 2021 @12:20AM
(#28186240)
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.
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.