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Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1

blog.ipfs.io

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Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1

#31

Post by na85 »

imhoguy wrote: post #9

Open 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…

In a lot of the world, upload speeds are very limited and ISPs charge an arm and a leg if you exceed your upstream data caps.

On top of that, Bit torrent has a tendency to overwhelm routers and make them slow to a crawl.

Those are a lot of downsides to ask your users to accept just so you can cheap out on download servers.

Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1

#32

Post by ingenieroariel »

This is a big deal, congratulations on the milestone. Really looking forward to trying out Reflex FRP / Obelisk from IPFS, in particular the focus on making the source available because fetching Nix packages from semi-public caches and not being able to rebuild them is something that has bothered me for a while.

Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1

#33

Post by akerro »

literallycancer wrote: post #22
akerro wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

How were the images delivered before?

hosted on my wordpress on a dedicated OVH servers.

Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1

#34

Post by akerro »

Shared404 wrote: post #20
akerro wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

I hear it in every discussion, yet I'm still waiting for any of my SD cards to fail. I've had the same rpi0 for 3 years as CCTV with motiond (motion detector). Recording all activity from my window, filling the card in 100% and removing all recorded data, every 2 days, no errors, no failure. I no longer need that CCTV so using the rpi, with the same SD card, as IPFS node.

Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1

#35

Post by Shared404 »

akerro wrote: post #34
Shared404 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hear it in every discussion, yet I'm still waiting for any of my SD cards to fail. I've had the same rpi0 for 3 years as CCTV with motiond (motion detector). Recording all activity from my window, filling the card in 100% and removing all recorded data, every 2 days, no errors, no failure. I no longer need that CCTV so using the rpi, with the same SD card, as IPFS node.

If it works it works :)

I just had it happen so I figured I'd bring it up just in case.

Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1

#37

Post by whyrusleeping »

alexmingoia wrote: post #36

One thing I’ve always wondered, is how DHTs like BitTorrent and IPFS prevent Sybil attacks. If anyone wanted to block a file in IPFS, could they generate node ids close to the filehash and return empty peer lists?

Yeah, sybill attacks are pretty hard to get around. IPFS itself doesnt entirely depend on a DHT though, it uses it when it can, but also falls back to a more gossip style approach of just asking peers you connect to for the data. So if you wait long enough, and the content is out there, you're very likely to end up finding it as your node makes and receives random connections throughout the network. This does still mean that the sybill attacker can severely degrade the quality of service though, so other solutions are getting looked into. The 'easiest' one that comes to mind is just forming an incentivized DHT of some kind, with the simplest start to that being a requirement that all DHT server peers stake some funds. There are a lot of weird things in this problem space, and its still pretty young IMO

Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1

#38

Post by cpuguy83 »

imhoguy wrote: post #9

Open 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…

Because changing things out is hard and the benefit of pulling in that much more code and complexity is dubious.

It seems like you could implement a p2p solution as a pull through registry... as in host a registry (even per node if you like) that Docker will use as a pull through cache, still speak the same distribution protocol, but have the registry use p2p to get the content.

Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1

#39

Post by whyrusleeping »

solarkraft wrote: post #26
imhoguy wrote: post #9

Open 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.

Some links without comment: - https://www.npmjs.com/package/ipfs-npm - https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/apt-on-ipfs - https://blog.ipfs.io/2020-02-14-improved-bitswap-for-contain...

Re: Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1

#40

Post by adsjhdashkj »

Tangent, what's the best way to use Nix-like features in a mainstream distro? Eg, i've been evaluating PopOS recently because i want a Mac equivalent OS. Ie, i don't want driver/config issues.

However one problem i never see solved from any "normal" distros is reproducible systems. Hypothetically if i used Nix as a Desktop my config would be bulletproof. .. but then i'm going through a fair amount of work configuring everything when, as established, i want none of it.

So i (as a user) seem to want some middleground between no effort installations / configurations of my Desktop, with reproducible snapshots/states/configs/something.

You can use Nixpkgs on other distros/OSs, so maybe that is enough. But is there a better way?

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