The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) can be used to provide files in a more efficient and distributed way than HTTP.
Our filesystem repo already has the go-ipfs client.
You use it with
ipfs daemon --init
And then you can add my Tumbleweed mirror with
zypper ar http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipns/opensuse.zq1.de./tumbleweed/repo/oss/ ipfs-oss
You can also browse the content online at
http://opensuse.zq1.de./tumbleweed/repo/oss/ . During my testing I found that the results are sometimes inappropriately cached on the Cloudflare CDN, so if you used it under this URL without the ipfs client, this might throw signature errors in zypper.
On the server side, the mirror is updated using the syncopensuse script from
https://github.com/bmwiedemann/opensusearchive and consistency of the repo is verified with checkrepo
When a complete repo was synced, dynaname updates a DNS entry to point to the new head:
> host -t txt _dnslink.opensuse.zq1.de.
_dnslink.opensuse.zq1.de is an alias for tumbleweedipfs.d.zq1.de.
tumbleweedipfs.d.zq1.de descriptive text “Last update: 2019-04-03 12:23:43 UTC”
tumbleweedipfs.d.zq1.de descriptive text “dnslink=/ipfs/QmSXEVuU5z23rDxMyFYDhSAUaGRUPswuSXD3aVsBEzucjE”
If you got spare bandwidth and 300 GB disk on some public server, you could also host a mirror of today’s version, simply by doing ipfs pin add QmSXEVuU5z23rDxMyFYDhSAUaGRUPswuSXD3aVsBEzucjE
This is a permalink: http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs/QmSXEVuU5z23rDxMyFYDhSAUaGRUPswuSXD3aVsBEzucjE also browsable via any public IPFS gateway. This means, it will always remain on the 20190401 version of Tumbleweed and no changes in content are possible – similar to how a git commit ID always refers to the same data.
So why did I create this IPFS mirror? That is related to my work on reproducible builds for openSUSE. There it regularly happened that published Tumbleweed binaries were built with libraries, compilers and toolchains that were no longer available in current Tumbleweed. This prevented me from verifying that the published binaries were indeed built correctly without manipulation on the OBS build workers.
Now, with this archive of rpms easily available, it was possible to verify many more Tumbleweed packages than before. And most importantly, it remains possible to independently verify even after Tumbleweed moves on to newer versions. This data is going to stay available as long as anyone pins it on a reachable server. I’m going to pin it as long as it remains relevant to me, so probably a bit until after the next full Tumbleweed rebuild – maybe 6 to 12 months.
Thus, it now is even less easy to sneak in binary backdoors during our package build process.
