Struggling to Pin an IPNS Path Using Kubo

[beth-roy]

I’m new to IPFS and recently started exploring it using Kubo v0.32.1. I’m trying to get the hang of pinning nodes, but I’m running into some issues when trying to pin an IPNS path.

I was able to pin a test CID successfully (QmbsGZ999Xk757uSGFMbFW2xW4F21CbGvmpx8A5JwP5Y5s) using the pin add command, and it shows up when I check what’s pinned on my node.

However, when I try to pin an IPNS path — specifically /ipns/libstc.cc — it says “fetched 47 nodes,” and hangs but when I check what’s pinned afterward, the nodes are not pinned.

[meermanr]

I wonder if this is the same issue I’ve been experiencing with ipfs pin add, where it seems to hang trying to get a handful of blocks but otherwise succeeds.

`ipfs pin add` often hangs with a wantlist of ~7 CIDs

I’m running a private swarm at work to push disk images to lab equipment, and I’ve found that ipfs pin add often hangs with seemingly just a few items in the want list shown by ipfs stats bitswap. Typically if I run a second instance of ipfs pin add it will complete within a few seconds and both ipfs pin add processes then return. I’ve taken to looping over all my nodes to launch second, and sometimes third, ipfs pin add processes to get things moving along faster. That seems wrong, but I’m not…

While I don’t have a solution, I have found that running a second (or third) instance of ipfs pin add on the hung client helps. Maybe that will work for you too?

When I was new to IPFS I did make the mistake of assuming that becuase I added a file locally and published it via IPNS that it would also be pinned locally: that is not always the case. My node would publish CIDs it cannot actually provide: it only has some of the blocks referenced. You can check this by running ipfs dag stat $CID on the publishing node. If that hangs than it is likely the publishing node doesn’t actually hold all the data.