I2P: How does the reseed works ?

Question

I saw in this question that there are hard coded reseed servers.

How does it work exactly ?

Answer 1

Indeed, the question cited refers to a list of url. The reseed process starts with choosing randomly one of them.

So let's assume that the choosen URL is : https://i2p.mooo.com/netDb/. Here are the next steps :

• Download an SU3 file, which must be named i2pseeds.su3 and located at the root :

  curl -k -A "Wget/1.11.4" https://i2p.mooo.com/netDb/i2pseeds.su3 > i2pseeds.su3
  

• Check Signature and type:

  java -jar lib/i2p.jar su3file showversion i2pseeds.su3
  

  Or

  kovri-util su3file showversion i2pseeds.su3
  

• Extract the included file :

  java -jar lib/i2p.jar su3file extract i2pseeds.su3 i2pseeds.zip
  

  Or

   kovri-util su3file extract i2pseeds.su3 i2pseeds.zip
  

• Unzip :

   mkdir tmp && cd tmp && unzip ../i2pseeds.zip
  

At this point, you should see a list of files whose name looks like routerInfo-(44 character base 64 router hash).dat

Each file can be inspected with :

kovri-util routerinfo <filename>

Or

java -jar lib/router.jar routerinfo <filename>

These are the informations needed to start contacting other peers in the I2P network.