Is there any way to check the "health" of an ipfs file?

[traverseda]

With torrents, you can generally get the number of seeders. Does ipfs have a similar mechanism? Can ipfs have a similar mechanism?

[RichardLitt]

Currently, it looks like you can only get a lower bound: ipfs dht findprovs <hash> | wc -l. For example:

$ ipfs dht findprovs QmW2WQi7j6c7UgJTarActp7tDNikE4B2qXtFCfLPdsgaTQ | wc -l
20

[traverseda]

And what, exactly, does that do?

What's a prov?

[RichardLitt]

A provider, here represented by the peer ID, is a peer in the DHT that can provide a specific value, given a key. In essence, AFAIK, a seeder. So, there are 20 seeders for that hash.

[Ghoughpteighbteau]

http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmW2WQi7j6c7UgJTarActp7tDNikE4B2qXtFCfLPdsgaTQ/cat.jpg

why do so many people have this picture 😆

[Kubuxu]

Because people love kittens.

[EtherTyper]

@Ghoughpteighbteau It's a picture used in some IPFS tutorials.

[madavieb]

This issue has been moved to https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/is-there-any-way-to-check-the-health-of-an-ipfs-file/338.

[shessenauer]

Is dht findprovs available with ipfsjs? Getting promise errors when trying to implement (Not from my end)