Is it down for everyone or just me? Firefox is showing PR_CONNECT_ABORTED_ERROR when trying to navigate to the link.
It works for me, but I'll drop this just to be safe:
Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1
21–30 of 92 posts
Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1
#22Does IPFS actually solve the problem they set out here though? IPFS is a distributed CDN; but not very good for storing things persistently or reliably from my experience. At the moment; the nixos cache is stored in very durable and reliable S3 storage; with very high durability guarantees. Why is that not good enough? sure it's centralised. But IPFS doesn't offer distributed durability; it offers a CDN. It doesn't s…
I started moving images of my wordpress blog to ipfs using 3 most popular gateways. I'm moving slowly, image by image, but so far it was quite a success. As images expire from the gateways I had super simple and cheap IPFS nodes - unused raspberry pi! My main IPFS node is RPi 0W (the wireless one). It overall dropped my main page loading times, and it costs £5 (rpi) + £5 32Gb sd card. First images - the smallest and…
How were the images delivered before?
Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1
#23Interesting use case for IPFS, which has often felt like an (admittedly cool) solution in search of a problem. Can someone enlighten me as to real-world examples where actually reproducible builds are critical?
Our team uses Nix. It lets us share a binary cache of modified/own packages between the developers, CI, and our production machines.
If you push something to CI that needs some new dependencies, the CI machine will build them and when you want to get a local dev environment or deploy, the binaries will be fetched from the CI machine. We can also send the binaries between machines to save compile time. This is possible because we have confidence that it doesn't matter which machine built them because the environment is so strictly controlled.
Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started moving images of my wordpress blog to ipfs using 3 most popular gateways. I'm moving slowly, image by image, but so far it was quite a success. As images expire from the gateways I had super simple and cheap IPFS nodes - unused raspberry pi! My main IPFS node is RPi 0W (the wireless one). It overall dropped my main page loading times, and it costs £5 (rpi) + £5 32Gb sd card. First images - the smallest and…
I don't know what your software config on the pi is, but if it's writing to the SD card a lot it'll wear out and fail pretty quickly. Just a heads up from someone who's been bitten.
Use external USB SSD (what I did for a mail server). One could also be very aggressive with making the kernel lazy about flushing to SD card. (It has downsides, but if you put a UPS shield on, it's a pretty neat hack.)
Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1
#25Interesting use case for IPFS, which has often felt like an (admittedly cool) solution in search of a problem. Can someone enlighten me as to real-world examples where actually reproducible builds are critical?
Confusingly enough, when NixOS talks about reproducible builds they are not talking about https://reproducible-builds.org/. They are talking about reproducible systems.
NixOS doesn't solve reproducible builds as-in "bit-for-bit identical binary distributed files", but it does solve "same input" -> "functionally same system". This is the core idea of NixOS and what makes the package manager and the spawned ecosystem (like Guix) quite neat. I also think this isn't any more controversial then say having your infrastructure reproducible with terraform and ansible/salt. It gives you machines as cattle, and not pets, with the added flexibility that gives you. NixOS is just a complete package where in other systems there are several components accomplishing the goal.
As to why reproducible builds is important is to ensure a strong connection between the upstream source code and the distributed binary build. This gives you confidence that everything going into the build has been declared and that the binary can be reproduced bit-for-bit identical if you so wish.
This can be both important in a supply chain process. I recently saw tailscale provided pre-compiled binaries without signatures. What does those binaries contain? They are not signed, so the releases could very well be unauthenticated and someone could have compromised the server distributing the binaries. So I tried reproducing the tailscale binaries without much success as the build process is proprietary.
https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/779
So what does the tailscale binaries contain? I can't get a bit-for-bit identical binary without putting into a great deal of effort so for all intents and purposes they can very well be proprietary.
Now I don't think the tailscale people are malicious, nor that the binaries have been replaced. But it's a real-world example I recently went through.
Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1
#26Open source plus distributed p2p file sharing is the killer combo. I don't get why public stuff like NPM, DEB or Docker registries haven't switched to use it as primary way of distribution. P2P, such as IPFS and recently BitTorrent 2.0 with its hash tree per file, is the only free (as beer and speech) reliable way to host things online forever - at least as long there is the last of the veterans who keeps a copy and…
> I don't get why public stuff like NPM, DEB or Docker registries haven't switched to use it as primary way of distribution
2 of them are run by commercial entities. I don't think those are all that interested in reducing dependency on them.
Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
We built an alternative to IPFS called Skynet that attempts to solve a couple of the major issues with IPFS. The biggest one being data durability and uptime. On Skynet, pinning doesn't mean hosting the file from your machine, it means paying a bunch of service providers to host the file for you. When you pin content to Skynet, you can turn off your computer 5 minutes later and the data will still be available global…
Interesting project, though to be clear, you're using the Sia network and not IPFS right? Also do you have Swift bindings for use in an iOS app?
Yes Skynet leverages the Sia network for storage and retrieval.
We don't have swift bindings but other developers have been able to make iOS apps without much trouble - the API is pretty clean.
Example: https://github.com/tetek/skynet-ios
Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1
#28Does IPFS actually solve the problem they set out here though? IPFS is a distributed CDN; but not very good for storing things persistently or reliably from my experience. At the moment; the nixos cache is stored in very durable and reliable S3 storage; with very high durability guarantees. Why is that not good enough? sure it's centralised. But IPFS doesn't offer distributed durability; it offers a CDN. It doesn't s…
I imagine you would ensure the persistence of the data you care about by either running your own IPFS nodes that pin the data, or by using a pinning service like Pinata [1]. [1] https://pinata.cloud/
The problem with Pinata is that they charge $150 per TB for their Individual plan. That's nearly 6.5x the cost of storing the data on S3. Sure it works, but that high barrier to entry pricing scares off a lot of people. Why not just use S3?
Meanwhile, we're still waiting for Filecoin to launch, and networks such as Sia have seized that opportunity and created great things like Skynet [1]. Skynet itself still has some overhead if you want to ensure data persistence and availability, but the cost is orders of magnitude lower. In addition, new layer 2 providers have emerged to address those gaps, such as Filebase [2]. They provide S3 compatible object storage that is backed by decentralized cloud storage. You get high availability (of the storage layer), geo-redundancy, and less than S3 pricing out of the box.
It is this type of offering where we are going to see the most impact and adoption as the underlying technology not only makes things more efficient, but cheaper too.
Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1
#29Interesting use case for IPFS, which has often felt like an (admittedly cool) solution in search of a problem. Can someone enlighten me as to real-world examples where actually reproducible builds are critical?
Confusingly enough, when NixOS talks about reproducible builds they are not talking about https://reproducible-builds.org/ . They are talking about reproducible systems. NixOS doesn't solve reproducible builds as-in "bit-for-bit identical binary distributed files", but it does solve "same input" -> "functionally same system". This is the core idea of NixOS and what makes the package manager and the spawned ecosystem…
Even when the binaries are signed you'd still have to trust Tailscale they didn't modify the code before compilation, maybe putting in a simple back door. They probably don't, but you can't really know.
When you have binary reproducible builds such a thing would immediately be obvious and hell would break loose if they attempted it.
Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1
#30Does anyone know if there are authz features planned for ipfs? Like having acls based on certificates or something...