Publishing this site on IPFS

Sun 08 October 2017

There has been a lot of buzz online recently about IPFS. In particular, I read this fascinating piece on Hacker News about how cyber-activists had leveraged IPFS to get around Spain's federal legal block on all Independence referendum activities.

I've always been interested by p2p networks so this immediately grabbed me. I downloaded and started playing around with it. I am very impressed. This technology could radically change the web as we know it, making it much more decentralised, resilient and fault tolerant.

I decided to go ahead and publish my site on IPFS and it has been a relatively painless process. Most of the changes I had to make to the site were down to how I had handled relative links previously. The docs on the official website are excellent and there are plenty of other resources and tutorials on the net for anybody interested in getting started.

The only caution I would issue is that this technology is still in its infancy so I wouldn't rely on it for anything critical yet. There are definitely some rough edges that need to be resolved. For example. I've discovered that DNS resolution can often be painfully slow and this is something the developers are aware of. Go-ipfs, the main implementation of IPFS (written in Go) also has high memory requirements and appears to suffer from memory leaks. I've had to write a script to restart the daemon regularly on a server with 2GB RAM because of this. This is something which will have to be addressed if IPFS is to have any success on embedded or IOT devices.

My site can be found on IPFS at /ipns/nakhan.net.