Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#11

Post by CapacitorSet » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 2:07 PM UTC

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #8

One thing I'm missing (or misunderstanding) about IPFS is updates. In a centralized system, like HTTP, a site has a single address: something.example.com. Any new entry (e.g. blog post) I create gets its own entry address, but is also referenced from the main site address. As far as I understand, IPFS contains static copies of documents, so any document that would be the "front" page would have to be copied before up…

One word: IPNS.

It's a DNS-like system, though much slower than DNS due to propagation delays. It points to the latest version (hash) of a document, much like a git branch.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#12

Post by foxhop » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

paulogr wrote: post #9

heavenlyblue wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do I (perma-)link the user to the latest status page?

IPFS has a so called IPNS system that use mutable hashes. So when you publish using this piece of software you got always a permanent link to share with your users.

What if I wanted to always link to the latest, like from my normal HTTPS powered web site?

Is there a way to link to the head so that it always references the latest version?

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#13

Post by travelton » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

paulogr wrote: post #2

One of the main problems while I was researching about status page services and saw many having the same doubts here was about where to deploy the status page. Besides this market has a lot of players even the biggest one had problem when the big S3 outage happened last year (see ref-1). What about do not depend on a centralized infrastructure to deploy you status page and kept always alive? This project aims to depl…

If I understand correctly, you still need a gateway VPS to proxy the ipfs site out to the internet over http. Isn't this a single point of failure, as your gateway server will be pegged. Or am I misunderstanding the implementation? You could have a VPS in multiple regions, but we're back at square one.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#14

Post by dna_polymerase » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

travelton wrote: post #13

paulogr wrote: post #2

One of the main problems while I was researching about status page services and saw many having the same doubts here was about where to deploy the status page. Besides this market has a lot of players even the biggest one had problem when the big S3 outage happened last year (see ref-1). What about do not depend on a centralized infrastructure to deploy you status page and kept always alive? This project aims to depl…

If I understand correctly, you still need a gateway VPS to proxy the ipfs site out to the internet over http. Isn't this a single point of failure, as your gateway server will be pegged. Or am I misunderstanding the implementation? You could have a VPS in multiple regions, but we're back at square one.

I think you can run IPFS locally and access the IPFS network without a gateway this way.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#15

Post by Kudos » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 2:16 PM UTC

dna_polymerase wrote: post #14

travelton wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand correctly, you still need a gateway VPS to proxy the ipfs site out to the internet over http. Isn't this a single point of failure, as your gateway server will be pegged. Or am I misunderstanding the implementation? You could have a VPS in multiple regions, but we're back at square one.

I think you can run IPFS locally and access the IPFS network without a gateway this way.

Sounds like IPFS needs more ubiquity before this is something you can rely on. I know IPFS support is coming to Firefox soon, but I suspect it's much further off for other browsers.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#16

Post by survivaletc » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 2:16 PM UTC

I love that the background image is a schematic of a centralized network. Look at that single point of failure! ^^

https://www.dstatuspage.net/decentralized.png

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#17

Post by fyi1183 » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 2:18 PM UTC

foxhop wrote: post #6

paulogr wrote: post #2

One of the main problems while I was researching about status page services and saw many having the same doubts here was about where to deploy the status page. Besides this market has a lot of players even the biggest one had problem when the big S3 outage happened last year (see ref-1). What about do not depend on a centralized infrastructure to deploy you status page and kept always alive? This project aims to depl…

I'm brand new to the IPFS concept, this looks really cool! I was surprised to see that the page served via IPFS supports HTTPS, do you happen to know how the secret key is securely shared among nodes in the decentralized environment?

The HTTPS is served by the proxy, it has nothing to do with IPFS.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#18

Post by mstade » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

foxhop wrote: post #12

paulogr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS has a so called IPNS system that use mutable hashes. So when you publish using this piece of software you got always a permanent link to share with your users.

What if I wanted to always link to the latest, like from my normal HTTPS powered web site? Is there a way to link to the head so that it always references the latest version?

I believe that's what the previous poster means, you get a namespace that points to the canonical version of your resource, whatever that may be. Kind of like how HEAD is an alias for the latest SHA on a branch in git. But I don't know, this is just how I understood the previous comment.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#19

Post by paulogr » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 2:20 PM UTC

foxhop wrote: post #10

> Powered by D StatusPage on IPFS The URI on the footer of the status page points to here: https://www.statuspage.co - but it doesn't appear to load, is this an artifact from development?

This is a bug from development :) I saw this and will be fixed on next release. Thanks for reporting.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#20

Post by paulogr » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 2:22 PM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #7

I mean, your status page itself may be on ipfs but since ipfs isn’t natively supported as a browser protocol, your “decentralization” fails since you’ll likely need to host the http ipfs gateway somewhere. Might as well stick your status page on a couple of vps (literally just two on two different continents) and round robin them.

The gotcha there is that you can use multiple gateways to access you page. So you are right, you need to have a http ipfs but you can have many of then and anyone hosting an IPFS node can have a copy of your page and serve it.