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Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

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Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#61

Post by diggan »

icebraining wrote: post #21
Kudos wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"IPFS support is coming to Firefox soon" Not exactly, as far as I understand it; you still need to manually install an addon, it's just that the addon can now handle ipfs:// links when you click on them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16243530

That's entirely correct. Before it had to be prefixed with `web+` and now just `ipfs://` will work.

For the extension, the IPFS community have been developing one which will use this new feature: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-companion

PR for tracking the protocol handler is here: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-companion/pull/359

Disclaimer: I work for Protocol Labs on IPFS

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#62

Post by diggan »

vertex-four wrote: post #46
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.

IPNS has a huge flaw, as I understand it - there is no way to prove, as a consumer of an IPNS name, that you’ve got the latest data. A malicious node in the network could present you with outdated information and you’d have no way to tell.

You can't prove that you got the absolute latest data (same with DNS by the way) as it's being distributed. However, a malicious node in the network can't present you with outdated information or false information, as the IPNS record is signed with the key from the peer.

If the IPNS record wasn't signed, it would indeed be a huge flaw as it wouldn't be tied to a key from a peer. That would defeat the entire purpose of IPNS. Luckily, we don't have that flaw in IPNS :)

Disclaimer: I work for Protocol Labs on IPFS

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#63

Post by jstanley »

book_mentioned wrote: post #37

This is such a natural use case for IPFS that commercial adoption seems inevitable; as first mover you can offer the concierge edition and optionally gain a ton of credibility by open sourcing some of the core bits! It sounds like your marketing will need to explain: 1. How updates work and how you guarantee staying universes away from NSFW/illegal content -- answered separately because nobody wants to find out what…

Is IPFS infamous for illegal content?

My perception was that it's still much too easy to trace the origin of content on IPFS and therefore not suitable for illegal things.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#64

Post by diggan »

wybiral wrote: post #45
icebraining wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand it, proxying it is dangerous because IPFS will announce all your IPs so that the shortest routes can be established. You probably need to run it in a VM/container that only has access to Tor and no other network adapter.

Ah, good to know. I love the idea behind IPFS but it just doesn't feel mature enough yet. The documentation, examples, consistent APIs, etc, don't seem very solidified.

Thanks! We're hard at work making everything better, especially the documentation and examples bit, but lots of work on the APIs as well.

If you have anything concrete to suggest or help out with, please open up a issue in the relevant repository, this would be the entrypoint to find your way around in our Github organization: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs

Disclaimer: I work for Protocol Labs on IPFS

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#65

Post by corben »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #5
Nelkins wrote: post #4

How timely, considering I am intermittently getting gateway timeouts on HN right now.

Speaking of which, what's up with the Twitter frame on the status page? I keep getting HN errors quite regularly, but the Twitter bot reports that the most recent failure happened two years ago...

Here's a status page for HN that has built-in monitoring, so it shows all downtime: https://hn.hund.io

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#66

Post by vertex-four »

diggan wrote: post #62
vertex-four wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPNS has a huge flaw, as I understand it - there is no way to prove, as a consumer of an IPNS name, that you’ve got the latest data. A malicious node in the network could present you with outdated information and you’d have no way to tell.

You can't prove that you got the absolute latest data (same with DNS by the way) as it's being distributed. However, a malicious node in the network can't present you with outdated information or false information, as the IPNS record is signed with the key from the peer. If the IPNS record wasn't signed, it would indeed be a huge flaw as it wouldn't be tied to a key from a peer. That would defeat the entire purpose o…

> However, a malicious node in the network can't present you with outdated information or false information, as the IPNS record is signed with the key from the peer.

False information - no. Outdated information - why not? What you've described in this comment doesn't solve it. If I signed that the name N points at hash H1 yesterday, and then signed that the name N points at hash H2 today, why can a malicious node not simply keep telling people asking for N that it points at H1?

Do IPNS signatures expire in a similar way to DNSSEC signatures? (Some poking around github says "maybe".) If so, does the owner of the IPNS name have to regularly connect to the network to refresh them? This would suggest that IPNS records can very easily disappear with no way to reinstate them, even if other nodes are keeping the data they point to up. Is this documented somewhere? Can I set a much shorter expiration time (e.g. 5 minutes for quickly-updating information)?

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#67

Post by KirinDave »

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…

Why is this desirable?

IPFS nodes don't really rehost content for any substantial period of time (especially the gateway) so you're still stuck with some major problems:

1. You're still hosting off your IPFS node. This isn't worse, but it isn't better. You need to have a node and it needs to have connectivity.

2. IPNS resolution is glacial and it's a known issue without resolution currently. So any gateway trying to resolve your current version of the IPFS-hosted status page through a gateway using IPNS can often end up waiting seconds (sometimes even tens of seconds) for name resolution, giving the impression of a downed status page.

Sadly, IPFS is more of a decentralized presentation and perhaps caching framework. It doesn't really achieve the goal of decentralized storage until there is some reliable way to persist the data on the network beyond immediate use. Pinning services exist, but most seem quite expensive to me.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#68

Post by KirinDave »

sudhirj wrote: post #57
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.

Anybody can gateway the entire IPFS network, so not really. The officially maintained gateway is just one gateway. If you don’t want to rely on it, can run your own.

But without sufficient traffic you'll incur IPNS lookup penalties.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#69

Post by giancarlostoro »

jstanley wrote: post #63
book_mentioned wrote: post #37

This is such a natural use case for IPFS that commercial adoption seems inevitable; as first mover you can offer the concierge edition and optionally gain a ton of credibility by open sourcing some of the core bits! It sounds like your marketing will need to explain: 1. How updates work and how you guarantee staying universes away from NSFW/illegal content -- answered separately because nobody wants to find out what…

Is IPFS infamous for illegal content? My perception was that it's still much too easy to trace the origin of content on IPFS and therefore not suitable for illegal things.

Everyone's IP is public, and I think your home network gets exposed which I think is the worst part of it (or so I was told).

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#70

Post by book_mentioned »

jstanley wrote: post #63
book_mentioned wrote: post #37

This is such a natural use case for IPFS that commercial adoption seems inevitable; as first mover you can offer the concierge edition and optionally gain a ton of credibility by open sourcing some of the core bits! It sounds like your marketing will need to explain: 1. How updates work and how you guarantee staying universes away from NSFW/illegal content -- answered separately because nobody wants to find out what…

Is IPFS infamous for illegal content? My perception was that it's still much too easy to trace the origin of content on IPFS and therefore not suitable for illegal things.

Depends on target market, so ideally non-technical perception (enterprise budget). There is probably still time to do effective marketing that conveniently doesn't emphasize it but discreetly assuages any concerns.

However, I am hard pressed to find any sizable HN discussion that doesn't mention it? It's basically worrying about what shows up as downsides when Googling, since most potential customers are starting from zero.

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