What if IPFS's public DHT bootstrap shutdown?

When your node boot, it tries to connect to them, fail and your DHT routing table is empty and you cannot request / serve any content via internet.

Yes it has already happen because of configuration issues in the infra.

  1. MDNS (discovering other nodes on your local network)
    You just need already bootstrapped nodes running on your LAN.

  2. Using other nodes, the best way is to save some peers you are connected to ipfs swarm peers > backup-bootstrap and pick a few (like 50, you just need one of them to be online and integrated into the DHT) and use that for bootstrapping.

Right now we are using the bootstrap nodes on each boot of the node, because it’s an easy thing to write and enginer time is precious.

We want to save nodes you connect to while running and use them for next bootstrapping.
So you would only need to do so on the first install of IPFS, not each restart.

It will then be really easy to share you peerstore (or whatever) file to someone else online. Making bootstrap nodes just a convinience thing for people that don’t want to download a second file when installing.
It’s how some other DHT networks (like i2p) do it.

The important thing is that joinning that list is not a good solution. Yes it’s better if there is more diversity but ideally you don’t really on some magic list (multicast over WAN is sadly not accessible in enough places).

Anyway if you want to join that list see this: Kicking off the Content Addressed Alliance Working Group, Intro yourself (afaik it’s meant for organisations not individuals)

3 Likes