Navigating I2P
Navigating the I2P network has been made very easy with addressbooks. Addressbooks help to find new eepsites you may be interested in and helps with not having to remember a very lengthy address. For clients, please look at my previous post.
Address Length + Discovery
A base32 address is determined by a base64 address for the eepsite. The b32 address is still too long for most people to remember and can look like vyros74gy2ubpkvoga6wy5qn264kiar2gb2qxemov4p2abnzzgca.b32.i2p. People generally can’t remember such an address and most people don’t want to have to bookmark every eepsite they visit frequently. The solution is to use an addressbook. Addressbooks resolve a short address such as yourdomain.i2p to a very long address. When you are subscribed to an addressbook, your client keeps a local copy on your machine which is updated periodically. At addressbook eepsites, they may have a few different subscriptions such as all.txt or alive.txt so choose which one you need. If an address cannot be found, you will get an error like Remote host not found in router's addressbook and you will be presented with jump service options. This will send a query of the address to whichever jump service you choose and if it is saved on their server, they will provide you a address helper link to add it to your addressbook and/or a b32 link. Having to remember short addresses is a lot easier than the alternative.
Addressbooks have many eepsites linked on them. Discovering new eepsites is much easier because you can find them on these eepsites. Some of these addressbooks even categorize eepsites into different genres, when it was last up and other information.
Which Addressbooks?
There are many that exist. Choose whichever you want to. These are some eepsites that have addressbooks available on them. Below each is their b32 address.
notbob.i2p
nytzrhrjjfsutowojvxi7hphesskpqqr65wpistz6wa7cpajhp7a.b32.i2p
isitup.i2p
xk6ypey2az23vtdkitjxvanlshztmjs2ekd6sp77m4obszf6ocfq.b32.i2p
reg.i2p
shx5vqsw7usdaunyzr2qmes2fq37oumybpudrd4jjj4e4vk4uusa.b32.i2p
identiguy.i2p
3mzmrus2oron5fxptw7hw2puho3bnqmw2hqy7nw64dsrrjwdilva.b32.i2p
inr.i2p
joajgazyztfssty4w2on5oaqksz6tqoxbduy553y34mf4byv6gpq.b32.i2p
stats.i2p
kqypgjpjwrphnzebod5ev3ts2vtii6e5tntrg4rnfijqc7rypldq.b32.i2p
rus.i2p
gh6655arkncnbrzq5tmq4xpn36734d4tdza6flbw5xppye2dt6ga.b32.i2p
skank.i2p
qiii4iqrj3fwv4ucaji2oykcvsob75jviycv3ghw7dhzxg2kq53q.b32.i2p
i2p-projekt.i2p
udhdrtrcetjm5sxzskjyr5ztpeszydbh4dpl3pl4utgqqw2v4jna.b32.i2p
Subscribe
Depending on your client, you will need to do this differently.
I2PD
Modify i2pd.conf (/etc/i2pd/i2pd.conf) uncommenting and adding subscriptions to “subscriptions” which can look like subscriptions = http://reg.i2p/hosts.txt,http://identiguy.i2p/hosts.txt,http://stats.i2p/cgi-bin/newhosts.txt,http://rus.i2p/hosts.txt.
I2P
Go to http://127.0.0.1:7657/dns , select subscriptions, add any and click save. Depending on your installation, find where subscriptions.txt is and add any there without having to use a browser. For example /home/$USER/.i2p/addressbook/subscriptions.txt.
Issues
Addressbook eepsites aren’t around forever. They come and go. Some have been around a lot longer than others but them dying and sometimes poor uptime results in a worse user experience.
The greatest issue with addressbooks is they have great power. They have the power to not allow a submission to their addressbook, to not resolve an address and to resolve an eepsite address to a different b32 address. The best ways to stay ahead of this is to use addressbooks you trust or stick to using b32 addresses that you may manually add to your addresbook to resolve to an address instead of using other people’s addressbooks. For people operating eepsites, publish your address to all the addressbooks you know of.
