About me: My name is Solène Rapenne, pronouns she/her. I like learning and sharing knowledge. Hobbies: '(BSD OpenBSD Qubes OS Lisp cmdline gaming security QubesOS internet-stuff). I love percent and lambda characters. OpenBSD developer solene@. No AI is involved in this blog.

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OpenBSD 6.9 packages using IPFS

Written by Solène, on 01 May 2021.
Tags: #openbsd #ipfs

Comments on Fediverse/Mastodon

1. Update 15/07/2021 §

I disable the IPFS service because it's nearly not used and draw too much CPU on my server. It was a nice experiment, thank you very much for the support and suggestions.

2. Introduction §

OpenBSD 6.9 has been released and I decided to extend my IPFS experiment to latest release. This mean you can fetch packages and base sets for 6.9 amd64 now over IPFS.

If you don't know what IPFS is, I recommend you to read my previous articles about IPFS.

Note that it also works for -current / amd64, the server automatically checks for new updates of 6.9 and -current every 8 hours.

3. Benefits §

The benefits is to play with IPFS to understand how it works with a real world use case. Instead of using mirrors to distributes packages, my server is providing the packages and everyone downloading it can also participate into providing data to other IPFS client, this can be seen as a dynamic Bittorrent CDN (Content Delivery Network), instead of making a torrent per file, it's automatic. You certainly wouldn't download each packages as separate torrents files, nor you would download all the packages in a single torrent.

This could reduce the need for mirrors and potentially make faster packages access to people who are far from a mirrors if many people close to that person use IPFS and downloaded the data. This is a great technology that can only be beneficial once it reach a critical mass of adopters.

4. Installing IPFS on OpenBSD §

To make it brief, there are instructions in the provided pkg-readme but I will give a few advice (that I may add to the pkg-readme later). 

pkg_add go-ipfs
su -l -s /bin/sh _go-ipfs -c "IPFS_PATH=/var/go-ipfs /usr/local/bin/ipfs init"
rcctl enable go_ipfs

# recommended settings
rcctl set go_ipfs flags --routing=dhtclient --enable-namesys-pubsub

cat <<EOF >> /etc/login.conf
go_ipfs:\
	:openfiles=2048:\
	:tc=daemon:
EOF

rcctl start go_ipfs

Put this in /etc/installurl: 

http://k51qzi5uqu5dmebzq75vx3z23lsixir3cxi26ckl409ylblbjigjb1oluj3f2z.ipns.localhost:8080/pub/OpenBSD

5. Conclusion §

Now, pkg_add will automatically download the packages from IPFS, if more people use it, it will be faster and more resilient than if only my server is distributing the packages.

Have fun and enjoy 6.9 !

If you are worried about security, packages distributed are the same than the one on the mirrors, pkg_add automatically checks the signature in the files against the signify keys available in /etc/signify/ so if pkg_add works, the packages are legitimates.