Reproviding an IPNS record without changing it

[leerspace]

@BenLubar

Is there a way to provide an existing IPNS record to the DHT?

I don’t think this will be supported until this issue is closed.

@BenLubar

Confusingly, my node seems to ask the entire DHT if it has a newer version of the record every time I do ipfs resolve on the IPNS key, despite being the only node that has ever held the private key for that PeerID. It seems like this is what’s causing a lot of IPNS-related slowness.

You’re right that it’s looking for newer versions. It doesn’t know a priori that if it tries to look up a newer version in the DHT it won’t find one – since private keys for publishing can be shared.

@BenLubar

There probably needs to be a way for the node to say “not only is this IPNS record good for 24 hours, but if you see it within 3 hours, you can just stop searching and accept it rather than continuing to search for a newer version.”

I don’t know of a way to say “anything within the last 3 hours is fine”, but you can do a couple of things to speed up name resolution if you don’t care about the newest record.

# stream DHT entries as they're returned
ipfs name resolve --stream /ipns/...

# look for 2 records from the DHT to resolve the address, and only take up to 5 seconds
ipfs name resolve --dhtrc 2 --dhtt 5s /ipns/