`ipfs dht findprovs` doesn't find local node for hash I just got

Help Kubo
1

I successfully transferred my first directory via IPFS last night! :tada:

It was quite hard work in comparison to the demo video. I had to open ports on my router, manually tell node 1 to provide the block, manually tell node 2 to connect to node 1. The connection kept dropping so I had to manually re-establish it to get the different files in the folders and all my attempts to see my files via the gateway at https://ipfs.io timed out but I at least managed a transfer between two of my own machines and I can definitely see the potential here.

I can see GitHub issues open that look like they might account for most of the difficulties I encountered but there’s one thing I wanted to ask to improve my understanding. When I ran ipfs dht findprovs <hash> on node 1 for the directory added on node 1, it returned the id for node 1. So far so good. When I ran the same command on node 2 after getting the resource on that node, it did not find itself. My assumption was that, once a node has a block, it will then become a provider of that block automatically. Since that is empirically not the case, my question is under what circumstances do nodes become providers of blocks?

2

The issue to this might be that you’re not waiting long enough for your node to announce to the network that its providing a block. In order to find your node via the ipfs dht findprovs command, your node first needs to announce to the network that it is providing this value. How often this happens really depends o how your node is configured.

3

Thanks for the reply. That makes sense.