storj-ipfs-ds-plugin

README

Storj-IPFS-DS-Plugin (Alpha)

DO NOT USE FOR IMPORTANT DATA

This repository contains code to facilitate running an IPFS node using the Storj network as the datastorage backend. It does this leveraging a good chunk of code that was borrowed from go-ds-s3.

The immediate benefit to a system like this is a mass amount of data protection (redundancy, decentralization, and durability) not present with traditional IPFS nodes. Traditional IPFS nodes require many copies of the data to spread it amongst multiple hosts and to achieve redundancy measures. However, when combined with Storj a single IPFS node is atuomatically distributing data across a vast number of machines accomplishing:

1. Data distribution
2. Data decentralization
3. Data redundancy
4. Native data encryption at rest ¹

1: Data is stored within the Storj network encrypted, however this does not imply that the data is encrypted to the IPFS network. Simply sharing the content hash to someone is enough for them to be able to pull the data and decrypt it.

Contents

• node folder is a work-in-progress purpose-built IPFS node designed to use the Storj network as the data storage backend.
• s3 folder is a modified version of go-ds-s3
• storj folder is where the actual plugin lives
• log folder is a wrapper around the zap package by uber
• fsrepo is a hack of go-ipfs/repo/fsrepo to allow for a storj configuration profile during ipfs init
• go-ipfs-repo is a hack of go-ipfs-config to allow for a storj configuration profile during ipfs init

Install

Note 1: the build process assumes that the IPFS repository will be placed in $HOME/.ipfs, if you want to point to another path you'll need to edit the make file.

Note 2: This must be worked on in an appropriate Golang environment designed to work with dep (ie, package must be downloaded to `GOPATH/src/github.com/RTradeLtd/storj-ipfs-ds-plugin)

To build from, and install from source on a machine which already has an initialized IPFS instance, you can run the following command.

git clone https://github.com/RTradeLtd/storj-ipfs-ds-plugin.git
cd storj-ipfs-ds-plugin
make install

If you aren't running this on a machine that already has an initialized IPFS node, running the following commands will handle the initialization process

git clone https://github.com/RTradeLtd/storj-ipfs-ds-plugin.git
cd storj-ipfs-ds-plugin
make first-install

Running either of the above make commands will create a folder build and place both the IPFS binary, and Storj plugin inside.

When running ipfs init --profile=storj (which is what make first-install) does, you can automatically configure your s3 access key, and s3 secret key with the following environment variables, otherwise you'll have to manually edit $IPFS_PATH/config

STORJ_ACCESS_KEY=...
STORJ_SECRET_KEY=...

Developing

This uses the 0.4.18 release of the IPFS code base, with a few hacks to fsrepo and go-ipfs-config get the ipfs daemon to recognize storj as a valid configuration profile. It is recommended that you develop against the storj-sim network, for which an excellent tutorial can be seen on medium

After making any changes to fsrepo run make fsrepo to update the version used by the bundled go-ipfs dependency

After making any changes to go-ipfs-config run make go-ipfs-config to update the version used by the bundled go-ipfs dependency

Dependencies

All dependencies needed are shipped with this repository. It uses go-ipfs 0.4.18, with all IPFS dependencies managed by gx. Please see package.json for a detailed list of IPFS dependencies.

None IPFS dependencies are managed by dep

This has only been tested with go1.11+

Warnings

Being alpha level software there are a ton of gotchas please read the following in detail

Superficial Data Loss

This is still very much experimental software and lots of issues are present. The most notable issue is that when storing data into S3 via Storj, anytime you restart a node it appears as if "data is lost". Data is not actually lost, and it is still stored in the S3 interface, but running a command such as ipfs pin ls shows that nothing is stored. Additionally running ipfs repo stat shows that barely any space is being taken up, and that there are no objects

There are a few potential causes for this:

1. the $IPFS_PATH/blocks and $IPFS_PATH/datastore not containing anything
2. some of the encryption/path encryption that storj performs
3. Data distribution due to reed-solomon
4. ????

Inconsistencies

There are numerous data inconsistencies (albeit superficial). For example note the following output from ipfs repo stat:

solidity@dark:~/go/src/github.com/RTradeLtd/storj-ipfs-ds-plugin/build$ ./ipfs repo stat
NumObjects: 0
RepoSize:   28881
StorageMax: 10000000000
RepoPath:   /home/solidity/.ipfs
Version:    fs-repo@7

But now note the output from ipfs pin ls | wc -l:

solidity@dark:~/go/src/github.com/RTradeLtd/storj-ipfs-ds-plugin/build$ ./ipfs pin ls | wc -l
162

Performance

Performance when running in a local development environment (ie, storj-sim) is noticeably slower than when using other IPFS datastores, and currently when using a remote storj network (ie, not storj-sim) the performance tanks even more.

Configuration

IPFS

If you need to manually configure $IPFS_PATH/plugins you can do so with the following snippet (note, you'll need to change settings as desired):

  "Datastore": {
    "StorageMax": "10GB",
    "StorageGCWatermark": 90,
    "GCPeriod": "1h",
    "Spec": {
      "mounts": [
        {
          "child": {
            "accessKey": "45qhD6QdHjrNJ65vua16ZoRwEtTV",
            "secretKey": "4MFwsyGXCuuND15Wt37P7MH8HvVV",
            "bucket": "go-ipfs-storj-5",
            "region": "us-east-1",
            "endpoint": "http://127.0.0.1:9000",
            "rootDirectory": "",
            "type": "storj",
            "logPath": ""
          },
          "mountpoint": "/blocks",
          "name": "storj",
          "type": "log"
        },
        {
          "child": {
            "compression": "none",
            "path": "datastore",
            "type": "levelds"
          },
          "mountpoint": "/",
          "prefix": "leveldb.datastore",
          "type": "measure"
        }
      ],
      "type": "mount"
    },
    "HashOnRead": false,
    "BloomFilterSize": 0
  },

You will then need to update $IPFS_PATH/datastore_spec to reflect the above:

{"mounts":[{"bucket":"go-ipfs-storj-5","endpoint":"http://127.0.0.1:9000","mountpoint":"/blocks","region":"us-east-1","rootDirectory":""},{"mountpoint":"/","path":"datastore","type":"levelds"}],"type":"mount"}

Storj

When using a remote satellite,, you'll probably want to update your rs (reed-solomon) settings of the Storj minio gateway to something like

# the largest amount of pieces to encode to. n.
rs.max-threshold: 50
# the minimum pieces required to recover a segment. k.
rs.min-threshold: 20
# the minimum safe pieces before a repair is triggered. m.
rs.repair-threshold: 25
# the desired total pieces for a segment. o.
rs.success-threshold: 40
``