Feat: p2p lan discovery. Viability?

[Xarishark]

How viable would a p2p discovery system be as a possible alternative source to save bandwidth.
A client asked me to moved his whole office to Linux and i would like to move them to a ublue image but the have over 20 pcs. problem is that every week 15 mins after the system is turned on if an update is out its then pulled. I have no problem with that as updates are always offline. My problem is that 20 pcs will do that separately and will pull the same images from the repo.

So my question is the following. Would a system that discovers local sources to pull available images and hash check them be viable?
I am not talking about middleware repo or something I am asking about an automatic system that could be included in every installation of the ostree system with the ability to announce itself as a possible provider.

ofc this would work only under lan and would easily be enabled when wanted by admins. Off by default for obvious reason.

Would anything like that have the ability to ever be safe?

[miabbott]

For the problem you are describing, I would suggest using a local OCI registry on the office LAN that mirrors the ublue images that you want to provide. Something like Gitea is open source and provides a container registry. You could even use Gitea to setup an automated build of a custom ublue image (related: https://mrguitar.net/?p=2587).

There are a couple of P2P image distribution solutions out there, but they are mostly focused on Kubernetes deployments.

• Spegel
• Dragonfly

The native ostree commit format does have P2P support available (see ostree-find-remotes); I found references to Flathub having support for it. However, I don't believe that support extends to the OCI image format.

[Xarishark]

Would something like that be a good idea to for further inspection? P2P image pulling from LAN machines with a discovery service for availability would make the feature accessible and most importantly automatic other than being activated. Local bandwidth even through 100 workstations cost nothing compared to using the Distros OCI Registry.

Only reason I am asking is because the basic p2p feature support IS there already to a point as you said.

I could open a feature request if you feel is worth it even if its going to tackled at a much later date

[miabbott]

My feeling is that it is unlikely that the P2P support in ostree would be expanded to cover the OCI image format.

Most of the primary maintainers of ostree are focused on bootc and the ecosystem there. If you were going to open a feature request, I would target it for that community.

[Xarishark]

Oh got it I am pretty new to this. Thanks for showing me the way!