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by growse 65 days ago
A non-trivial minority of the time, they don't support IPv4 either!
4 comments

GitHub is at the point where it immediately rate limits me if I try to look at a project's commit history without being logged in, as in the first time I even open a single URL to the commit history, I get "Too Many Requests" from GitHub thrown at me. I don't know if my work's antivirus stack is causing GitHub to be suspicious of me, but it's definitely egregious.
It’s not you or your setup. I experience the same behavior. Tried with and without Private Relay, residential and commercial ISPs at different locations, and more to debug it. Same results.

I think GitHub has just gotten so aggressive with their rate limit policies that it’s straight up incompatible with their own product. The charitable interpretation is that they aren’t keeping good track of how many requests each page actually performs in order to calibrate rate limiting.

If you didn't specifically test without it, I'd attribute that to cgnat
On the other side of the coin, they also punish people who have slow connections. The acceptable speed for downloading from github on my connection is 90k/sec. No more, no less. Something prevents the rate from being higher (probably Github), and if the rate drops any lower for any length of time, the connection will suddenly abort right in the middle of the download. Since the dumpster fire that is git doesn't support resume, welcome to hell. If I didn't have a fast server elsewhere to git to then zip up and re-download, I'd be screwed.
My theory is that they rate limit that URL aggressively due to AI scrapers. At this point it's faster to just clone the repo and do your searching locally.
Your work is probably all exiting through the same IP, you competing with others on the same IP is causing the rate limit.
The very same thing happen on my residential connection, I can do one search query, then I'm rate limited for 15+ minutes, same if I access any list of commits.
I've considered this, but the company is small enough that the number of people who would be on GitHub at any moment (instead of our internal git forge) can be counted on one hand, and when I'm the first one there in the morning it still rate limits me.
Do you have any on-prem cicd jobs that access github? Our's kept failing, had to move over to the ECR release of some stuff.
Hm, I've also noticed sites being more aggressive about verifications after I started using LLMs locally. They think I'm a bot (which... fair), even on completely unrelated sites I seem to be getting prompted for human verification much more often.
Maybe your company's ISP is CGNat'ting you?
May explain the ipv6 resistance. Hard to do effective per-ip rate-limiting with v6.
I don't understand, wouldn't it make it easier?
No, IPv6 as it is supposed to be implemented gives (say) a single server a /64, which is for all intents and purposes an inexhaustible supply of IPs. You could in principle have an IP per site you visit and have plenty left to spare.

Random Google result with a bit more:

https://www.captaindns.com/en/blog/ipv6-subnet-sizes-48-vs-5...

So if I wanted to annoy GitHub, I could connect to them without ever using the same IP twice. Their response would have to be banning my /64, or possibly /56.

> No, IPv6 as it is supposed to be implemented gives (say) a single server a /64, which is for all intents and purposes an inexhaustible supply of IPs. You could in principle have an IP per site you visit and have plenty left to spare.

No, as it's supposed to be implemented a single internet-routable /64 is used per *network* and then most devices are expected to assign themselves a single address within that network using SLAAC.

ISPs are then expected to provide each connected *site* with at least a /56 and in some cases a /48 so the site's admins can then split that apart in to /64s for whatever networks they may have running at the site. That said, I'm on AT&T fiber and I am allocated a /60 instead, which IMO is still plenty for a home internet connection because even the most insane homelab setups are rarely going to need more than 16 subnets.

> So if I wanted to annoy GitHub, I could connect to them without ever using the same IP twice. Their response would have to be banning my /64, or possibly /56.

Well yeah, but it's not like it's exactly rocket science to implement any sorts of IP rate limiting or blocking at the subnet level instead of individual IP. For those purposes you can basically assume that a v6 /64 is equivalent to a v4 /32. A /56 is more or less comparable to /25 through /29 block assignments from a normal ISP, and a /48 is comparable to a /24 as the smallest network that can be advertised in the global routing tables.

Its not harder to rate limit a /64 though.
IPv1, IPv2, and IPv3 were very early experimental versions of the Internet Protocol developed in the 1970s during the ARPANET era (the precursor to the modern internet). Has anyone tried to find out if GitHub is reliable on those?
should we try going back to IPX ?
IPX/SPX is datagram only. BUT it would be an opportunity to build a QUIC-like that runs over it :-)
Comically IPv6 now has almost all the neat stuff IPX did. There probably is an argument for more datagram centric networking these days as the underlying services are generally much faster and more reliable and there is so much more session tracking going on at higher application layers anyway.
I've used IPX exactly once in my life, playing Diablo over modems calling my dorm neighbor to establish the connection (in 2005).
Only if we're bringing back Token Ring, too.
That might be challenging, I hear people are pretty short on tokens these days.
There's only one token! It's just very popular.
While we're at what about older physical layers? Coaxial based stuff seems cool in 2026
Isn’t that what MoCa is for?
Isn’t twinax just “I heard you like coax so I put coax in your coax.”
twinax I think is used more like a balanced line with shielding. Twisted pair is preferred because it is cheaper, but for short stuff like SATA the cost difference is so low it might as well be used
If it’s not 10BaseT I can’t see small spread adoption.
Arcnet for me.
I remember removing the IPX route entries from our Cat65 MSFC back in 2006 and from the ATM/Framerelay WAN Equipment. Wasn't very popular with the customers.

I also remember the first IPv6 Workshop on W2k SP3 back in 2002. Not that long ago.

What? One nine isn’t good enough for you?
Excuse me. Zero nines. Or two nines if you relax your definition of where they are in the number. https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/116334321751266751
Excuse me, but I see 4 nines. 95 incidents in last 90 days, 89.91% uptime.
we shut down our production every day from 2pm till 5pm for a siesta :)
You jest... (but probably not!)

I remember when I was first using my alma mater's online sign up for classes in the very early 2000s, their class sign up site had office hours.

You guys have nines?
You must be from Anthropic
the ghost of twitter's past
Personally I’d look for the coveted 5 eights uptime.
66.6% uptime anyone?
Only if it's Australia.
Still better than five eighths.
As long as it is after the decimal separator I can try for that...