#i2p-dev (irc2p) | dev build 2.5.0-3 | Network reliability is degraded, please be patient as we work on mitigations

mesh zzz: when I close a client socket the server gets a I2PSocketException, STATUS_CONNECTION_RESET

mesh what does this status mean?

mesh ls

mesh oops

mesh zzz: are you familiar with TcpNoDelay?

zzz mesh, how may I help you?

mesh zzz: hey

mesh zzz: was curious about TcpNoDelay and I2P

mesh what do you think about simulating Socket.setTcpNoDelay(true) by setting a very small WriteBuffer on a Socket

mesh I2PSocketOptions.setMaxBufferSize(10) or even 1

mesh good idea? terrible idea?

zzz what's the problem you're trying to solve?

mesh zzz: well from 10,000ft... I would like a way to telnet into a Java process over i2p without creating a bunch of server and client tunnels

zzz so how does a small write buffer solve that problem?

mesh telnet is a pretty simple protocol but it's really designed for "streaming" ... ie most telnet clients and servers invoke java.net.Socket.setTcpNoDelay(true)

mesh I was thinking I could simulate this by setting a very small write buffer

zzz i think that would perform horribly, if we even allow it

zzz streaming + i2p has enormous overhead compared to TCP

zzz we have a 'passive flush delay' param internally, but there's no config option to override it

mesh zzz: I2PSocketOptions has a method setMaxBufferSize

zzz you asked good or terrible idea, my answer is terrible

mesh but you're saying that the 'passive flush delay' timer would prevent real time streaming

zzz not saying that at all

zzz but if you're concerned about latency, you're not going to be happy with i2p

zzz if you want to implement telnet or anything else where you know when you've written all the data, then call flush()

mesh zzz: ok. it's interesting because irc seems to mostly perform well over i2p and it is also a "streaming text protocol". Is this something the IRC tunnel optimizes?

zzz does it call flush() ? probably

zzz my point is there's nagle-like delays at multiple protocol layers, in every router your data travels through.

zzz this is for efficiency given the large overhead that i2p adds at each layer

mesh yeah it's a good point. obviously TcpNoDelay doesn't make any sense for i2p. But in the general case of streaming data as fast as possible it sounds like the best bet is just to reduce the hop count and call flush often

zzz flush() will save you 100 ms or so, but don't call it unless you know you're out of data

zzz my irc client is reporting 0.5 sec round trip, that's not bad through 13 routers. flush() will get the data started out the door of your router but obviously won't do anything about the delays in the other 13

mesh zzz: yeah I think for something like irc it's not so bad. irc is a line-oriented protocol and what I envision is roughjly the same

mesh it sounds like what you want to avoid is "telnet character mode":

mesh In telnet Character mode, only one character is transmitted at a time. The server will acknowledge the receipt of character by echoing it back to the TELNET client. The TELNET client will send back a TCP ACK packet to the TELNET server to inform the receipt of echo from server.

mesh that level of chattiness would perform terribly over i2p, with one character bouncing back and forth

mesh In TELNET Line mode, data is transmitted one full line at a time. TELNET client and server negotiate to run in TELNET line mode.

mesh but in Line mode telnet isn't so different from irc

zzz remember a tunnel message is 1 KB. say you called flush after every char

zzz that's 1000x overhead

mesh zzz: yeah it sounds like the system is more designed for what I think some people call "document based" protocols and not necessarily interactive protocols

mesh it actually sounds like telnet or even ssh might not be such a good fit for irc. I'll do some more research on this

zzz our current latency is about 500 ms round trip. there's not a lot you can do to reduce it other than shorter tunnels. if you need sub-100ms latency for your application, it's not going to happen

mesh zzz: ok. thanks a lot for the tip. I think I'll head back to the drawing board :)

zzz mesh, easy to test, set up a standard server and standard client in i2ptunnel, point server to port 22 or 23

mesh foiled by org.apache.http.util haha

mesh zzz: btw i2p.jar has a package org.apache.http.util ... it's a big problem :/

mesh hmmm, so the problem is both i2p-1.7.0.jar and httpcore-4.4.15.jar; contains this class org.apache.http.util.Args

mesh the i2p version of the class is much older and is missing methods that httpcore needs. Fortunately if you move httpcore to appear earlier in the classpath than things sort of work

mesh the real fun starts if you're app is modularized

mesh in which case neither of these projects are modules and there's an unrecoverable split package error

mesh i2p-1.7.0.jar probably should *not* be "exporting" packages in the org.apache* namespace since these are uh apache projects

mesh might be able to work around this by creating a non-modularized launcher project

mesh I did this once on an earlier project but the process was so terrible that I think I blocked it out

mesh I2P's StandardSocket is package private

mesh but for now we can cut and paste

mesh and since httpcore uses the ServerSocketFactory we can basically get httpcore's webserver talking to an I2PSocket

mesh hello world seems to work

zzz you dont need StandardSocket or anything else in impl

mesh zzz: does I2P give me an implementation of javax.net.ServerSocketFactory;

zzz if it's not in net.i2p.client.streaming then no

zzz what would it bind to?

mesh zzz: can you take a look at pastebin.com/FBUGTBXs ?

zzz I2PSocketManager.getStandardServerSocket() gives it to you, it's essentially the factory

mesh hmmm really

mesh oh yeah that will work too

mesh didn't realize that getStandardServerSocket() existed

mesh I manually did the same thing, creating code that wrapped I2PSocket by copying and pasting StandardSocket

mesh wrapping that in a ServerSocketFactory and passed it to httpcore

mesh the good news is that it seems to work. if you go to wndphwm65gnpdmggv5ohai5pasdwstdy7gobnhiks5ag7iwelena.b32.i2p you can see my amazing blog

mesh the bad news is that both http-core-4.4.5.jar and i2p-1.7.0.jar contain this class org.apache.http.util.Args

mesh the web server works without creating any kind of i2ptunnel but I think I'm going to have to split the project into a modular and non-modular piece

mesh I2PSocketManager#getStandardServerSocket works too

mesh zzz: I think it would still be useful if StandardSocket was public

zzz no

mesh unless is there an existing api for making an I2PSocket look like a Socket?

zzz stay out of impl, b/c it's the impl.

mesh something like I2PSocket.asSocket() might work. I think in my case I will have a I2PServerSocket that returns I2PSockets and then I would want to feed those into one or more webservers running on different ports

zzz it's a Socket, that's all you need to know

mesh zzz: I need to (some of the time) transform I2PSocket to Socket so it can be fed into a web server. In other cases though I want to work with the I2PSocket directly. It all depends on which port the client is accessing.

zzz no you can't turn one into the other, but if you want to work with Sockets instead of I2PSockets, that's what the "standard" methods are for

zzz pick one or the other

mesh zzz: Well I need to support both. Some services want I2PSocket and some services want Socket. It's really just a question of the port.

zzz unfortunately I2PSocket does not extend Socket, that's a decision made 19 years ago, before my time

mesh zzz: I mean for now I can create a copy of StandardSocket. That's what I did here pastebin.com/FBUGTBXs. But I think adding a method like I2PSocket#asStandardSocket() would definitely be useful

mesh at least in my use case I have I2P Services and non-I2P Services all working off the same Destination listening to different ports

mesh some of them want I2PSocket and others want Socket

mesh but no I don't think I2PSocket should extend Socket. But an adapter method could be provided

zzz sure, asSocket() could work, easy enough

mesh zzz: schweet. also pretty please rename org.apache.http.util. It causes a nasty collision with httpcore :)

zzz so put your other jars first, or rip it out of i2p.jar

mesh zzz: I could do that but why not fix it at the source? it's really bad for i2p.jar to export org.apache packages imo

zzz please file issues on our gitlab for this or other suggestions, state your case there

mesh zzz: on github?

zzz no

zzz git.idk.i2p

mesh interesting. gitlab over i2p

eyedeekay Been running it for a couple years, works pretty well

eyedeekay There's a guide on the site if you ever want to run your own

mesh eyedeekay: can I host my code there if it's open source?

eyedeekay Yeah as long as the content is legal in the US and Canada and not spam it's open to everyone

mesh though of course the sit is mucky for me. sometimes I think I'm the only one in the world who runs windows in high contrast mode

eyedeekay I haven't done that since like, WinME... Is it the theme being applied by your system interfering with the site or a visual accessibility issue?

eyedeekay If you need to recolor things, that's actually available to you via your preferences i2pgit.org/-/profile/preferences

eyedeekay But you would need an account to access that

eyedeekay /i2pgit.org/git.idk.i2p/

mesh thanks I'll check it out

mesh I was thiunking about setting up a gitblit server ( gitblit.github.io/gitblit )

eyedeekay It would probably be almost the same as gitlab, the thing you as the server operator should watch out for is any user-facing "Import" functionality will need to be disabled or proxied, which can be tricky

mesh yeah. I'm sure it also leaks personal information like a sieve. though from what I can tell the code is pretty good

eyedeekay Couldn't speak to how much it leaks exactly, the concern is that with import functionality facing me as an account holder I can tell it to import "https://i2pgit.org/whatever/whatever" and then go into the logs and see what address tried to import whatever/whatever

eyedeekay Thereby potentially de-anonymizing your service

mesh yeah good point

eyedeekay That was a real sonofagun to figure out for gitlab actually, i2pgit's problem was different since it's non-anonymous, I needed to proxy for I2P-to-I2P imports

eyedeekay And Go honors HTTP_PROXY environment variables, but it doesn't proxy DNS requests for them, and some of the Ruby parts also make requests, so I can't just set up privoxy and set HTTP_PROXY=http://localhost:8118, you have to go in and change settings in multiple places and they're not all necessary or the same

mesh yeah I can only imagine.the attack surface for something like gitlab and evne gitblit is always going to be huge

mesh I think ideally you'd want a single git repo exposed via ssh with a read-only website for viewing it

mesh of course nobody thinks like this any more and sites like gitlab and github to bring a lot of value

mesh it's just that hosting and securing your own instance is always going to be a pain

eyedeekay There are services that don't suck to configure, but difficulty rises with complexity

eyedeekay Gitlab is in many ways a behemoth, if it wasn't monumental to do over again I would have done gitea instead

mesh eyedeekay: I think what I would eventually like is to be able to do something like: ./i2p-git-server --repo $BARE_REPO_URL

eyedeekay About gazillion% easier, in fact you can just fork it and stick

eyedeekay sam, _ := goSam.NewDefaultClient()

eyedeekay httpClient := &http.Client{ Transport: &http.Transport{ Dial: sam.Dial, },}

eyedeekay http.DefaultClient = httpClient

eyedeekay Oh I actually have a thing for that

eyedeekay It's called "eepHttpd"

mesh and that would make a single repo available over i2p through ssh+i2p and you could also browse it anonymously though http+i2p

eyedeekay Yeah that's exactly what it does

mesh or even git apparently works over http

eyedeekay I thought it would be a good alternative to github pages for in-I2P projects

mesh eyedeekay: yeah that's what I want. combined with Destination-based authentication it'd be pretty secure

eyedeekay But it's clonable too

mesh you don't get fancy issue management or pull requests or code reviews or release management or CI/CD

eyedeekay Nothing like that but only because I didn't consider it an important thing to implement at the time

mesh but it would make it very easy to host git repos over i2p and let some friends collaborate

eyedeekay That's the idea, pages, git, and SSH on one I2P-based hosting package

mesh you might not even need ssh but yes it'd be cool

eyedeekay I would include SSH because it's more familiar to people than encrypted leasesets or authentication but yeah it could be left out too

eyedeekay But that's how I ended up going on 7 plugins, 3 webextensions and 3 browser-wrappers

eyedeekay So until I find a way to manage that task a little better, I'm not trying to add more tasks

mesh haha yeah

mesh it's why centralization always wins. nobody really wants to run a bunch of git servers if they don't have to

mesh it's so funny that git, a wonderfully designed decentralized app, ended up being massively centralized heh

eyedeekay Honestly I think the financial barriers to entry to clearnet hosting and the fact that sites get easier to host as services evolve and not harder gives organizations with human and material resources early advantages that lead to centralization

mesh there's certainly economies of scale that kick in

eyedeekay eephttpd should require 20 minutes or less of maintenance a month when it reaches a finished state. Something like that is not a problem to self-host

eyedeekay There's some overlap here with I2P plugins

eyedeekay That's what I found to like about them

mesh see I think it would still centralized.give people a magical button that they can click and they get a git server on their computer that all their friends can access through the magic of i2p... no ned for buying a server, securing it, etc

mesh they'll still want to use centralized hosting

eyedeekay Many will. Hopefully a few less

mesh combine this with the fact that github is free thanks to those economies of scale and it becomes very tempting

eyedeekay I suppose on a technical level the best thing I can think of to do is close the gap, so to speak

eyedeekay github is free-and-easy, anything that wants to challenge them, even on a tiny scale, also needs to be free-and-easy

mesh eyedeekay: yeah. I think people are starting to understand the value in restricting access

mesh if you could get something close to github but could be severely restricted to the right people

mesh would be valuable

mesh man the jpms module stuff in java 9+ absolutely kills me