Arch Linux

imrehg

Member

From: London, UK

Registered: 2008-04-10

Posts: 108

Website

Archlinux ISOs over IPFS

I've been experimenting with IPFS recently, which allows for distributed file storage, backups, CDN, and suchalike... I guess when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but looking at the Arch ISO download page, it feels like besides the mirrors and BitTorrent, there would be space for an IPFS backup of the current ISOs for good measure, that would enable good distributed backup, and potentially also good download speed (depending on the number of nodes mirroring).

What I've done is taking the current mirror content (the 2017.10.01 folder contents), and added it here /ipns/QmU8uCpPWQeVcnnZmtj2H65cdB1dL8gTdtZfZ9F47bZScv. This is an ipns link, so when there's a new release coming out, the contents can be easily updated while the link remains the same.

This is sort of a community contribution, and such that anyone with a running IPFS daemon can help host by pinning the data, about 1GB, so it stays in their local storage and served from there:

ipfs pin add /ipns/QmU8uCpPWQeVcnnZmtj2H65cdB1dL8gTdtZfZ9F47bZScv

For those who are curious, what I've done (need a running ipfs daemon):

1. create a new key for this ISO sharing, with

   ipfs key gen -t rsa -s 4096 archiso

2. downloaded the mirror contents (minus the index.html files) to a folder, let's call it "isos"

3. add the folder contents to my local IPFS storage:

   ipfs add -r isos/

   which produces a hash that it can be referred by in the end

4. finally publish with the "archiso" key by

   ipfs name publish --key=archiso <hash-from-last-step>

Next time, whem there's an update, just repeat steps 2-4.

I think it could be cool to have an "official" ipns link, but in the meantime, I'm happy to update this whenever there are new images are released.

What do you think?

RedArcher

Member

From: South Africa

Registered: 2009-09-03

Posts: 88

Re: Archlinux ISOs over IPFS

What do you think?

I think that's a good idea!  I want to contribute bandwidth too

Last edited by RedArcher (2022-03-08 21:12:10)