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0 pointsyjftsjthsd-h2y ago0 comments

I'm not quite following (including trying to skim your links) - what mirror? I thought the point was that it was decentralized and should scale arbitrarily?

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3 comments · 1 top-level

Joe_Cool2y ago· 2 in thread

It worked like this: rsync2ipfs-cluster fetched the packages from a rsync mirror into an IPFS-MFS-Folder updated the link in IPNS and then added this folder to a running IPFS instance/cluster.

All of those packages are then available for pacman under the (unchanging) IPNS name and the packages themselves are stored in IPFS as usual files. All you had to was add `http://x86-64.archlinux.pkg.pacman.store.ipns.localhost:8080...` to your mirror list after running your ipfs node (or use a public ipfs gateway).

The website sadly is down now. It had a nicer explanation. None of this still works now however.

EDIT: the folder/list of files was managed by the user hosting the project. The files/packages themselves were distributed. That's just how IPFS/IPNS works. Somebody has to put them into IPFS.

EDIT2: technically the example I posted is a DNSLink which points to a (now gone) TXT record which points to an IPNS name (which is a mutable pointer) that contained the directory of all current archlinux packages.

I hope that was comprehensible.

yjftsjthsd-hOP2y ago

Ah, so when you say "Then the mirror became too slow and couldn't handle the amount of package data and was shut down" you're talking about the side that added packages to IPFS and did the initial seeding. That's what I wasn't following, thx.

Joe_Cool2y ago

Exactly. As I understood the problem lies in the import of new packages. That was hanging and the deletion of one single file from the folder took ~30s. In the older versions <=0.9 this was working faster. This caused the IPFS mirror to be days out of date. Then the project was discontinued.

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