I set up an IPFS node(?) on my server last night. The server has 3TB of space, so I thought I would be a good internet citizen and donate some space to mirror some of the ipfs archives (<a href="https://archives.ipfs.io/" rel="nofollow">https://archives.ipfs.io/</a>).<p>Simple, right? So I installed and launched the ipfs docker image and then ran `ipfs pin add QmTZeE4yTiDd76YxbWvenneqSf5VhooNnA46WWWHtHcu5n`. I thought this would download that hash (IETF RFC Archive) locally and mirror it.<p>Instead the command just hung there. No output. Left it for an hour, still no output. Debug mode was useless and printed out nothing interesting. It took me a long while to realize that `ipfs pin add` takes a <i>file path</i> of a <i>local file</i> and pins it (or something? still not clear).<p>Ok. So lets run `ipfs get QmTZeE4yTiDd76YxbWvenneqSf5VhooNnA46WWWHtHcu5n` and then we can run `ipfs pin add local-hash`. Hmm, no output and no progress at all. After an hour there was some form of output that said I had downloaded 15mb of the archive, and it would take 8 more minutes to do. It still said this two hours later. Ok, so lets leave it overnight in a screen session.<p>Cut to next morning, I wake up to a message from my provider saying that they detected a port scan originating from my server, specifically from the port that ipfs uses. I think their detection systems misclassified the traffic, but it's just extra hassle. <i>And</i> the archive was still on 15mb completed.<p>It's a very interesting technology, and it looks great for simple text files, but the UI is terrible. You want some kind of permanent web? Surely asking people to explicitly pin specific files isn't the way forward, wouldn't being able to say "I want to donate X gb of disk space, cache some stuff for people to use" be better?