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Iroh: A library to establish direct connection between peers

(github.com)
239 points gasull | 3 comments | 25 Jun 25 16:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.779s | source
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aquariusDue ◴[25 Jun 25 18:23 UTC] No.44380372[source]▶
I attended a workshop for iroh a while ago and really enjoyed it, and from what I can tell on the Discord server the folks developing it are gearing for a 1.0 release soon-ish.

There's also Dumb Pipe and SendMe which are demos (I believe) built on iroh to showcase some of its uses, and at the workshop we were shown a video of a startup using iroh for video game streaming (something similar to the old OnLive).

From what I understood (in spite of my lack of networking knowledge) and if I remember correctly clients have to be on the same relay (I think there's one for Europe and one for North America) and they use the Bittorent DHT Mainline (I had to google the iroh blog post about it because I forgot the exact name) for discovery. There was some stuff about BGP too, but it went over my head sadly.

I hope somebody more knowledgeable chimes in because iroh is really exciting, I feel like I could throw together a p2p application and it wouldn't be a daunting task due to it.

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b_fiive ◴[25 Jun 25 19:08 UTC] No.44380846[source]▶
(disclosure: I work on iroh): you're selling yourself short! All of this is accurate, except for maybe the BGP stuff :)

Dumb Pipe & Sendme me are indeed demos, we do provide a set of default, public relays to use for free. The relay code is also open source, and if you want to pay us we can run a network for you.

We try to provide a few different options for discovery, the one we think has the most general utility is a custom DNS server, but both local mDNS and Bittorrent Mainline are also pluggable options.

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1. divineg ◴[25 Jun 25 20:45 UTC] No.44381643[source]▶
Pardon me for jumping in the discussion, but I didn't know where else to ask this. Does Iroh support streaming, instead of moving blobs? I want to write a little p2p tool to forward one port from one machine to another. Also, forwarding UDP packets doesn't require the congestion control of QUIC. Does Iroh allow disabling it for a certain "message" or stream?
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2. ecesena ◴[26 Jun 25 01:03 UTC] No.44383287[source]▶
It looks like they have examples with unreliable channels: https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh/tree/main/iroh/examples

You'll prob have to check the max packet size that you want to forward because quic adds a bit of overhead.

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3. rklaehn ◴[26 Jun 25 01:30 UTC] No.44383435[source]▶
Yes. Iroh itself provides direct QUIC connections. iroh-blobs is a protocol on top of iroh that provides content-addressed data transfer of BLAKE3 hashed data.

What you describe sounds like https://www.dumbpipe.dev/ , a tool/demo built on top of iroh to provide a bidirectional pipe across devices, somewhat like netcat.

Dumbpipe also has a mode where it listens on a port using TCP.

It sounds like you want to basically build dumbpipe for UDP. You can of course use a QUIC stream, but QUIC has an extension, which we support, to send datagrams: https://docs.rs/iroh/latest/iroh/endpoint/struct.Connection....

This basically allows you to opt out of QUIC streams, but you still do get TLS encryption.

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