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Internet Archive Universal Library / Decentralized Web README

The Internet Archive (http://archive.org) is famous for their WayBack Machine that has saved 362+ Billion web pages, and more recently their Decentralized Web project.

This Ansible role installs the Internet Archive's dweb-mirror project on Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB). Use this to build up a dynamic offline library arising from the materials you can explore at http://dweb.archive.org

The project is a local server that allows users to browse resources from the Internet Archive stored on local drives - including USB drives.

It includes a crawler that can regularly synchronize local collections, against a list of Internet Archive items and collections, and those collections can be moved between installations.

When connected to the internet, the server works as a Proxy, i.e. it will store Internet Archive (IA) content the user views for later off-line viewing.

There are components to integrate the IA server with decentralized tools including IPFS, WebTorrent, GUN, WOLK, both for fetching content and for serving it back to the net or locally.

This is an ongoing project, continually adding support for new Internet Archive content types; new platforms; and new decentralized transports.

Using it

Starting server

The server is started and restarted automatically. It can be turned on or off at a terminal window with service internetarchive start or service internetarchive stop

Browsing

The server can be accessed at http://box:4244 or http://box.lan:4244 (try http://box.local:4244 via mDNS over a local network, if you don't have name resolution set up to reach your Internet-in-a-Box).

If future, we also hope to get http://box/archive and http://box.lan/archive working (as of 2019-05-25 the error "Cannot GET /archive" appears — if you can help us fix /etc/apache2/sites-available/internetarchive.conf that would be incredible!)

If you don’t get an Archive UI then look at the server log (in browser console) to see for any “FAILING” log lines which indicate a problem.

Expect to see errors in the Browser log for http://localhost:5001/api/v0/version?stream-channels=true which is checking for a local IPFS server which is not started here.

Expect, on slower machines or slower network connections, to see no images the first time, refresh after a little while and most should appear.

Administration

Administration is carried out through the same User Interface as browsing.

Access http://localhost:4244/local to see a display of local content, this interface is under development and various admin tools will be added here. At some point this will become the default page.

Access http://localhost:4244 to get the Internet Archive main interface if connected to the net.

While viewing an item or collection, the "Crawl" button in the top bar indicates whether the item is being crawled or not. Clicking it will cycle through three levels:

  • No crawling
  • Details - sufficient information will be crawled to display the page, for a collection this also means getting the thumbnails and metadata for the top items.
  • Full - crawls everything on the item, this can be a LOT of data, including full size videos etc, so use with care if bandwidth/disk is limited.

Disks

The server checks for caches of content in directories called archiveorg in all the likely places, in particular it looks in /media/pi/*archiveorg for any inserted USB drives, and if none are found, it uses /library/archiveorg.

The list of places it checks, in an unmodified installation can be seen at https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-mirror/blob/master/configDefaults.yaml#L7.

You can override this in dweb-mirror.config.yaml in the home directory of the user that runs the server, this is currently /root/dweb-mirror.config.yaml (see 'Advanced' below)

Archive's Items are stored in subdirectories of the first of these directories found, but are read from any of the locations.

If you disk space is getting full, its perfectly safe to delete any subdirectories, or to move them to an attached USB. Its also safe to move attached USB's from one device to another.

The one directory you should not move or delete is archiveorg/.hashstore in any of these locations, the server will refetch anything else it needs if you browse to the item again when connected to the internet.

Maintenance

If you are worried about corruption, or after for example hand-editing or moving cached items around.

# Run everything as root
sudo sh
# cd into location for your installation
cd /opt/iiab/internetarchive/node_modules/@internetarchive/dweb-mirror
./internetarchive -m

This will usually take about 5-10 minutes depending on the amount of material cached, just to rebuild a table of checksums.

Advanced

Most functionality of the tool is controlled by two YAML files, the second of which you can edit if you have access to the shell.

You can view the current configuration by going to http://box.lan:4244/info or http://localhost:4244/info depending on how you are connected.

The default, and user configurations are displayed as the 0 and 1 item in the /info call.

In the Repo is a default YAML file which is commented. It would be a bad idea to edit this, so I'm not going to tell you where it is on your installation! But anything from this file can be overridden by lines in /root/dweb-mirror.config.yaml. Make sure you understand how yaml works before editing this file, if you break it, you can copy a new default from dweb-mirror.config.yaml on the repo

TODO Note this file will probably move location.

Note that this file is also edited automatically when the Crawl button described above is clicked.

As the project develops, this file will be editable via a UI.

Update

Dweb-mirror is under rapid development, as is the JavaScript UI. It's recommended to update frequently.

From a Terminal window

sudo sh # Run all commands as root
cd /opt/iiab/internetarchive
yarn upgrade  # Currently this can take up to about 20 minutes to run, we hope to reduce that time

Crawling

The Crawler will be built into the UI fairly soon, for now it has to be run in a terminal window.

Its highly configurable either through the YAML file described above, or from the command line.

In a shell

# Run all commands as root from dweb-mirror's directory
sudo sh

# cd into location for your installation 
cd /opt/iiab/internetarchive/node_modules/@internetarchive/dweb-mirror

# To get a full list of possible arguments
./internetarchive --help

# Perform a standard crawl
./internetarchive --crawl 

# To fetch the "foobar" item from IA. 
./internetarchive --crawl foobar 

# To crawl top 10 items in the prelinger collection sufficiently to display and put 
# them on a disk plugged into the /media/pi/xyz
# TODO check where pi actually put them. 
./internetarchive --copydirectory /media/pi/xyz/archiveorg --crawl --rows 10 --level details prelinger

Troubleshooting

There are two logs of relevance, the browser and the server.

Browser: If using Chrome then this is at View / Developer Tools / JavaScript Console or something similar.

Server: From a Terminal window.

journalctl -u internetarchive

Known Issues

See github dweb-mirror issues; and github dweb-archive issues;

More info

Dweb-Mirror lives on GitHub at:

This project is part of the Internet Archive's larger Dweb project, see also: