I’d like to run an IPFS server on Windows 10 to get copies of data to help distribute it and decrease network response time. I did a test of grabbing the Corbett Report website on IPFS and it was really slow.
By “run an IPFS server” I mean I want to not just make my info available, I want to mirror other files other people have to help the network as a whole. Please correct me if I use the wrong terms.
Question 1: I have a dynamic IP as part of my home internet package. Can I still mirror data for distribution to help out?
Question 2: Can I easily add an external 4TB USB drive after I install IPFS? Would that be easy for a beginner? I know computers but not networking that well.
Question 3: Is there a minimum amount of space I have to mirror (that is not my own data) to run an IPFS server?
As you are using dynamic IP behind NAT, maybe your nodes are not reachable, and a relay is needed. The method is to configure EnableAutoRelay to true.
Swarm.EnableAutoRelay = true;
But it seems that it doesn’t work that well, currently.
Lastest version have some improvement, but I have not test it.
In one test it took maybe 30 minutes for me to get a public relay address to start getting advertised for my node. It looks like there might be some AutoNat/AutoRelay improvements coming in v0.4.20 , so perhaps this experimental feature will see some improvement in the next release.
refer: Getting auto-relay to work - #8 by leerspace 2019/04
First, you need to set the $IPFS_PATH environment variable to your external disk:
ipfs uses a repository in the local file system. By default, the repo is
located at ~/.ipfs. To change the repo location, set the $IPFS_PATH
environment variable:
export IPFS_PATH=/path/to/ipfsrepo
you can get this info with ipfs --help command.
config max storage
Second, you should configure the Datastore.StorageMax parameter, setting the upper limit for the size of the ipfs repository’s datastore.