validating which services continue to be available

[ansuz]

Historically lists of services on Hyperboria have fallen into bad states.

People tend to:

1. join the network
2. launch a service
3. add their service to the list
4. get bored or otherwise unable to maintain their service
5. disappear, but leave their service's address on the list

If we're going to attempt to maintain a list of services on the network, we should set up some means of testing whether they are still active, and some policy for when a service should be removed from the list.

[ansuz]

Perhaps for the purpose of encouraging existing efforts, we should require that to be added, a node must host a nodeinfo.json file.

[Kubuxu]

Requiring nodeinfo.json is good thing, daily checks of service availability also should be doable and might be useful even for service owners themselves, my site once went down I a didn't notice for a week.

Simple scriptable check engine, maybe in Lua would be awesome. We would store services and check scripts in this repo and have worker do the checks.

The script might be simple, fetch index.html, check if error code is ok in case of most sites. In case of IPFS gateway it might do a bit more extensive tests but those should be easy to write.

[benhylau]

Agree with all above, especially the importance of this.

One node may announce a service hosted by another node (i.e. One of the service:uri not associated with the node's public key). Is that permitted, or we have to check against that?

[ansuz]

data is now in services.json, which should make writing nightly tests a bit easier.

[kylerchin]

I did it manually.... f00gle is down, lots of services that should be added. Other than that, everything is up.