Ipns dht findpeer <hash> sometimes shows only local ips?

Hi, sometimes I see a hash shared that is only hosted by one person and when I run ‘ipns dht findpeer ’ on their hash I only see local 192.x and 127.x ip addresses. Does this make sense? Is this even possible since I am able to access their file and I tested it wasn’t cached on a proxy?

First ipns ? I guess you meant ipfs ?

This is likely that thoses nodes are behind restrictive nat (no upnp for example) and thus can’t be dialled from the outside, ideally autonat would setup a relay to fix this, but relays aren’t so great for now (not too many nodes relaying) it’s not enabled by default. See more there : When I pin a file on my IPNS Desktop it should first check if port 4001 is unblocked - #2 by Jorropo

Yes you are correct, ipfs. Typo.

If the peer is behind NAT and I can still access the file, is it possible to see who is serving me this file? The route/hops taken?

The peer in question is hosting this really cool page of the record humanity sent to outer space:

/ipfs/QmaFP38LkSFURqmGsv1TW6ncjuftRrZP8f78RR2Dd4hCGp/

There should be two providers. I am the second provider (pinning through Pinata)

I’m just curious as I thought masking peer IP is not possible with IPFS but it looks like this peer is essentially doing that and if so I would like to do that, too.

It could be that it’s the reverse, you are being contacted or already have a connection to someone who have this file.

IPFS doesn’t ask the file you are searching to only the people reachable.
IPFS will literally broadcast the want list to everyone, and if nobody have it then search in the DHT (this might be concurrent but still, want list is way faster than dht lookups anyway).

ipfs dht findprovs only looks at the DHT, it doesn’t attempt want list.

I believe dht findprovs will print bitswap providers too since bitswap wraps the DHT after all, but I’m not 100% sure.

I find it strange that a peer is publishing local addresses to the DHT. It might be a really old peer perhaps?. What is the peer id @ksaurus ?